posted in Technology
Google Maps renames “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” even faster than US government
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-maps-renames-lake-ontario-to-lake-america-even-faster-than-us-government/Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.
Replying to @technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
i wonder how many canadians that were sitting on the fence about de-googling are no longer sitting on that fence…
start by changing your default search, google ai overviews made it useless anyways. check out duck duck go or startpage
stop using google spyware browser (chrome and all chrome builds) and switch to firefox (or preferably a privacy focused fork, i.e. waterfox, librewolf
learn linux… quit windows
self-host your own server and run your own localized, private apps, immich instead of google photos, vaultwarden instead of password manager, jellyfin instead of netflix, etc.
5.???
Replying to @zebidiah@lemmy.ca
Duckduckgo is backed by microsoft/bing which they have a contract with.
Startpage is the duckduck alternative that uses google, its unknown wether they have a contract.
These places are still better then google/bing themselves but people often wrongfully assume that they provide a privacy oriented service.
If you really want to go anticorporate you can host your own searxng, which still by default uses results from google and bing but can be configured to use any on your preference and its code open to verify that they do not give exclusive permission to certain paying corporations.
Using searxng it can happen that some google result could not be retrieved because of api limits… one has to wonder why Startpage does not have those limits.
en.wikipedia.orgDuckDuckGo - WikipediaReplying to @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
Sure, duckduckgo dosent have their own web crawlers. Duckduckgo uses someone elses index in this case Microsofts. This dosent mean they sell your data to microsoft or that your search queries fingerprint you the same way as microsoft. They just use microsoft’s big list of websites
Replying to @MadPsyentist@lemmy.nz
They have a long standing corporate deal with microsoft.
The details are vague but this is not hidden, or kept secret.
Ddg has themselves said that the policy that required them to give exclusive acces to Microsoft trackers no longer applied and now blocks them since 2022. This is on the Wikipedia i shared.
But if you read between them lines. They are following Microsoft policies, if they are now allowed to block those trackers its because microslop allowed them to do so.
Tech companies only do such thing if they have incentives. A more covert way to get the same data, a long term plan to acquire and otherwise for PR.
Searxng also uses those same search querys but without corporate deal. Thats why if you refresh a lot you hit an api limit… any search engine that does not do that while using these trackers is somehow paying or bartering for access.
Replying to @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
The wiki referance linked and subsequent article talk about trackers on the DDG browser not about search queries. DDG have a corperate license with Microsoft, sure, but any amount of line reading on or between seems conspirital at best.
Looks like this corperate contract with Microsoft is a secret especially if you have to “between the lines” read about a completly seperate product.
And i go to a publicly hosted instance of searxng and immediatly get told the past 10 search queries? Dosent seem magicaly private to me. To which your response might be "its designed to be selfhosted. " Sure that maybe the case, but we are just putting extra lines on this social contract to read between now. Not terrible but not perfect, which is the same area DuckDuckGo is playing in so i am prepared to take them at their word.