Privacy-Focused DuckDuckGo Search Engine Says Traffic Has Soared Since Snowden Leaks
If you haven’t yet heard about DuckDuckGo, you probably will soon.
On its face, the search engine looks much the same as any other. A little more sparse, maybe, but nothing much separating it from, say, Google. There’s a logo and a box for your search.
Where it differs from its peers, though, is what happens when you hit enter.
Though silly in name, DuckDuckGo has a serious ethos: protection of user privacy at all costs. The engine, launched in 2009, shies away from the personalized filter bubbles so adored by search giants like Google and Bing, refusing to track searches or store user data. Users have the option to completely anonymize their search by routing it through the anonymizing TOR network, rendering it even more invisible to prying eyes. DuckDuckGo earns money through simple keyword-targeted advertising, steering clear of the tracking cookies used by more sophisticated ad campaigns.
Though the slavish dedication to privacy has its drawbacks — for example, results are less tailored to the user searching for them, and thus more likely to be irrelevant — the search engine has seen 3 billion searches a year and has a firm community of fans who are attracted to the site’s long-standing defense of user privacy.
Related: News Companies Have Good Reason to Fear Facebook
That ethos seems to be paying off. Gabe Weinberg, CEO of the Pennsylvania-based company, told CNBC last week that the search engine’s traffic has grown 600 percent since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the large-scale spying conducted by the government. DuckDuckGo’s search traffic was further assisted last year when Apple integrated it into the Safari mobile browser.
DuckDuckGo’s traffic is still tiny compared to the big players — the 3 billion searches a year that Weinberg claimed to have on CNBC is pretty much the same amount of searches that Google traffics in a single day. But DuckDuckGo expects steady growth as average users become increasingly educated about their privacy.
GOP Tax Cuts Getting Less Popular, Poll Finds
Friday marked the six-month anniversary of President Trump’s signing the Republican tax overhaul into law, and public opinion of the law is moving in the wrong direction for the GOP. A Monmouth University survey conducted earlier this month found that 34 percent of the public approves of the tax reform passed by Republicans late last year, while 41 percent disapprove. Approval has fallen by 6 points since late April and disapproval has slipped 3 points. The percentage of people who aren’t sure how they feel about the plan has risen from 16 percent in April to 24 percent this month.
Other findings from the poll of 806 U.S. adults:
- 19 percent approve of the job Congress is doing; 67 percent disapprove
- 40 percent say the country is heading in the right direction, up from 33 percent in April
- Democrats hold a 7-point edge in a generic House ballot
Special Tax Break Zones Defined for All 50 States
The U.S. Treasury has approved the final group of opportunity zones, which offer tax incentives for investments made in low-income areas. The zones were created by the tax law signed in December.
Bill Lucia of Route Fifty has some details: “Treasury says that nearly 35 million people live in the designated zones and that census tracts in the zones have an average poverty rate of about 32 percent based on figures from 2011 to 2015, compared to a rate of 17 percent for the average U.S. census tract.”
Click here to explore the dynamic map of the zones on the U.S. Treasury website.
Map of the Day: Affordable Care Act Premiums Since 2014
Axios breaks down how monthly premiums on benchmark Affordable Care Act policies have risen state by state since 2014. The average increase: $481.
Obamacare Repeal Would Lead to 17.1 Million More Uninsured in 2019: Study
A new analysis by the Urban Institute finds that if the Affordable Care Act were eliminated entirely, the number of uninsured would rise by 17.1 million — or 50 percent — in 2019. The study also found that federal spending would be reduced by almost $147 billion next year if the ACA were fully repealed.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Mick Mulvaney has been running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since last November, and by all accounts the South Carolina conservative is none too happy with the agency charged with protecting citizens from fraud in the financial industry. The Hill recently wrote up “five ways Mulvaney is cracking down on his own agency,” and they include dropping cases against payday lenders, dismissing three advisory boards and an effort to rebrand the operation as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection — a move critics say is intended to deemphasize the consumer part of the agency’s mission.
Mulvaney recently scored a small victory on the last point, changing the sign in the agency’s building to the new initials. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does not exist,” Mulvaney told Congress in April, and now he’s proven the point, at least when it comes to the sign in his lobby (h/t to Vox and thanks to Alan Zibel of Public Citizen for the photo, via Twitter).
