The original version of this post is available at ARLIS/NA Multimedia and Technology Reviews. I am very grateful to Emilee Mathews, whose editorial work contributed immeasurably to the readability of this article.

DuckDuckGo is a Web search site that competes with Google, Bing, and other major players. DuckDuckGo’s premise, and its major competitive advantage, is its commitment to user privacy—and backs up that commitment through its powerful, accurate, and flexible searching capabilities.

DuckDuckGo ensures privacy for users because it does not do the following:

• collect any personal information
• log any CGI data that identifies your computer
• save your search queries
• share your search terms with the sites you visit from DuckDuckGo’s results pages.

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[Edit: this turned out to pretty much be a red herring.]

Let’s say a lot of people follow this blog. A lot of them probably wouldn’t remember when cable TV was rolling out in the 70’s and one of the BIG DEALS in their marketing rhetoric was how they don’t know what we’re watching and the cable doesn’t send info about what we’re doing back to them. It was the first time it was possible, and privacy, apparently, was important to TV viewers.

Now lots more of what we do is recorded, analyzed, and shared. What I was wondering is, now that we’re all sick of cable (we are semi-cord-cutters in our house, and mostly watch streamed shows), what do our Internet-connected TV set-top devices know about what we watch?

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