I don’t know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but I’ve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that don’t get a lot of results. When it happened again earlier this week, I finally grabbed a screenshot:

So, here I am searching for something related to the (relatively obscure, relatively progressive) religious denomination I belong to, and when DDG (or maybe Bing) couldn’t find anything related to the specific thing I was searching for, the first text result that it gave me was the best result it could find for a subset of my search matched with the town I live in: Lexington, Kentucky.

Opting out of location sharing is a good and important step, but there are no tech solutions to this horror—only political ones. We need good legislation, and we need it now.

Yes please.

The only thing worse than the already-bad reality of powerful, private data brokers is public agencies buying what they have to sell.