A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Source: their marketing page
From this discussion, I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole.
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Why do people list Ecosia when they talk about privacy???
They’re probably getting personal data for advertising like Google does, right?
They are a search proxy, sending your query to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and whomever else they partner with at the time. They don’t anonymize them either, which is how DDG works.
They plant trees. That was their thing. For the environment. I don’t know how they magically get lumped into privacy discussions. They don’t care about privacy at all.
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If I remember right it is a Searx fork. That company also makes a Webview browser, and a Firefox fork for Android.
If it’s free, someone pays the bill and you’re probably the product.
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A lot of open source software is made by enthusiasts for free. A lot more of it is made by companies like Microsoft or Google for various reasons - I believe mostly to claim “we’re open source”, but also to entice others to contribute more code that they can leverage for free, which is a valid reason too. One thing is sure: they do pay their engineers’ salaries
Free services however… That’s different: we all know why Microsoft or Google propose free services.
Now this unknown search engine you linked to: they could be funded by idealists who want to promote privacy, like the Calyx institute for example. However, looking at their website, I see no obvious reason why they propose the service they propose: they do have a Donate button that leads to a page with 4 payment links - 3 of which crypto - and their About Us button leads to a page that just says “test”. Kinda sketchy…
Therefore, I assume it’s up to no good, because that’s the reasonable thing to assume with any unknown website that looks sketchy.
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when it comes to server-side software, FOSS is of little importance unless you are self hosting. there is zero way for you to verify, unlike client software.
Open-source isn’t a guarantee that whoever makes the open-source software is privacy-respecting. Android was made by Google for example, and it was made open-source for the express purpose of creating a mobile OS ecosystem that would become so dominant it would allow Google to collect data on as many people as possible. Google invested massive amounts of money developing an entire operating system for a reason: they didn’t do it out of kindness.
Conversely, closed source isn’t a guarantee that whoever makes the software is up to no good. There’s plenty of closed source software out there that’s perfectly legit. But of course it’s harder to verify the code if you have doubts.
Being FOSS is not enough for trust by itself, but it is a necessary factor.