I use Qwant as my default search engine because I thought it was more respectful of my privacy than Google or Bing and DuckDuckGo is not giving so good results in my country (for localization related searches).
I noticed that the engine was removed from the default engines for URL bar in latest IronFox version. So I searched a bit about why so, and found this issue in their tracker : https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/47.
What to think about this ? The message from ironfox dev seems clear but qwant seems to claim that the shared data are anonymized.
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I don’t believe I misrepresented it. Others (such as Privacy Guides) also don’t recommend Qwant for similar reasons.
It doesn’t matter whether this type of data collection is only for logged in users/
optional/etc. Selling data and profiling users in any way, shape, or form is unacceptable. We’re trying to reserve our default search engines for the best of the best, and it’s clear that Qwant doesn’t align with the values of the IronFox project by engaging in this behavior, so it can’t make that cut. Users are of course always welcome to manually add Qwant if they trust it or wish to use it.Also, I just tested creating a Qwant account, and I received the following prompt:
This is extremely vague, doesn’t mention that the
partneris Microsoft, that this data is used for tracking and profiling users, etc. - it reads to me like something I’d see on the CMP of Google or YouTube… I don’t think it’s fair to say that users are voluntarily sharing their data or consenting to this.This is fair, as long as you still allow to add own search engine it’s good enough (I re-added qwant but I’m testing out alternatives a bit (searxng (public instance first), startpage and re-give a go to ddg to see if it improved a bit for local results)