The problem isn't so much that countries engage in spying. That's to be expected, really. The problems are in 1) how they go about doing it, 2) whom they're targeting and 3) what data they're collecting. So if they're 1) using backdoors in consumer products without use of warrants, 2) targeting members of the public without necessarily having good cause to do so and 3) collecting everything they possibly can, then there's a big problem. Spying on other countries or persons of interest with good cause and/or warrants is what these agencies generally do. What the NSA and GCHQ in particular are doing is far more than this and far more invasive for what seems like little meaningful return and at the risk of their reputations and their respective countries' reputations.

Right, so even though this is a blindly ignorant comment, it gets a score of 5, Interesting because it's anti-Microsoft? DDG isn't a browser, it's a search engine. It doesn't solely use Bing for its searches. It uses a variety of search engines, amongst them Yahoo and WolframAlpha, to generate its results. It's in no way funded by Microsoft, it's not affiliated with FairSearch and information does not get passed from DDG to Microsoft. DDG works as an intermediary and keeps no personal data.

And that's the primary appeal of DDG to the majority of its users - you avoid the filter bubble effect and none of your personal data is stored. Maybe you should've read their privacy policy before commenting. It would have made you sound less like the kind of typically reactionary cretin that all too often brings down the level of conversation on Slashdot.

Good grief, you would've thought this guy was just blindly commenting without having read the... Oh, right.