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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I would remove Qwant from this list, because they share your data with Bing, their privacy policy have contradicting statements and include:
Please, also review this if you plan to use qwant:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies
Why is Ecosia on the list?
Quoting from tosdr.org:
Doesn’t look privacy-respecting.
Brave seems to work for me
I can’t recommend a self hosted SearXNG instance enough.
DDG uses Bing as a search backend last I checked, and the founder/CEO is spoke in favour of censoring search results that don’t match with his worldview.
My take on it - if they block Tor can we really call it private?
Didn’t brave have some scandals. Idk that’s when I stopped using it
I remember some stuff too. But unlike the comments, I remember it was regarding privacy.
(I don’t remember what it was, and anyone I asked didn’t know what I’m talking about lol)
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
Their CEO donates money to anti-LGBT causes.
Source? I know some peeps who use brave who would like to know this.
Eich has a history of acting like a jagoff…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/3/5579516/outfoxed-how-protests-forced-mozillas-ceo-to-resign-in-11-days
https://cryptonews.com/news/brave-browser-courts-social-media-rage-with-covid-19-comment-8706.htm
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
He made the donation when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance.
He also spreads COVID misinformation.
Stop with the ad hominem attacks. We are interested in the tech specs and not your personal opinions of what is “right” and “wrong.” Stick to the point, which is privacy and the tech that goes with it.
If you think the two are unrelated you’re oblivious to the considerations that must be taken into account when discussing potential privacy concerns in software. It’s not ad hominem to acknowledge that the personal convictions and values of the CEO (and indeed other employees) can potentially decrease the sense of privacy of a product.
If the CEO is so adamant in his anti-X stance that he decides it’s acceptable to censor access to materials about X, or perhaps worse that he decides to expose anyone using his software that discusses or supports X, would not consider those valid concerns?
Companies are made of people, and software is made by people. Since people are not neutral, companies and software are also not neutral. The stances of a company or software on privacy, freedoms, etc are all influenced by the stances on those exact issues by the constituent people of the company and developers of the software.
Consider Elon Musk and Twitter. Given Elon’s personal beliefs and how adamant he is to enact and enforce those beliefs, do you consider him a neutral influence on the privacy of Twitter as a product? There is no way to see him as a neutral influence; he has direct influence by his ideological stance on the software. As such, if you have enough distrust in him or his ideological stance, that can transfer to distrust in Twitter as software.
In fact, it’s not even about whether I support the CEO or whether I think his stance is “right” or “wrong” as you imply. It’s entirely about how the CEO sees his beliefs in relation to the company and product he’s overseeing. I could entirely agree with the CEO and still consider their influence to be a detriment to the product if he puts his ideology ahead of pragmatism, for example.
I see what you’re saying, but contrary to Twitter, Brave works very well and has very good security and privacy features. In fact it significantly improves upon Chromium which it is built on top of. It also offers massive improvements over Chrome in the privacy department. So whether he agrees with you that guys can become girls or vice versa, or whether he believes the same narrative that you do regarding corona is simply irrelevant. If you have found a new security or privacy flaw, I would love to hear about it. But pushing your irrelevant opinions on others who are not interested, is unpleasant for us, and a waste of time for you.
It’s interesting how you went from “it’s not relevant at all” to “it’s relevant in general but not in this case” after I gave you a reply.
My opinions are not irrelevant, as I laid out in my previous comment that you just agreed with. Others are obviously interested, and it’s not “unpleasant” for them, as people responded and upvoted (and no downvotes)–indicating it’s relevant. It’s not a waste of time for me, because not only did it take me negligible time to type literally three sentences (actually, I copy-and-pasted the comment from one I made earlier, I didn’t even write it fresh here), but it has value to others and as such is not a waste of time for me.
The strawman construction was a nice little touch. Completely ignoring the part where I laid out that my personal stance and agreement or disagreement with the CEO is irrelevant, you act as if I personally disagree with the CEO and then use that to dismiss me.
You obviously have an agenda. So be it. But this conversation is truly a waste of time: you were obviously wrong and as soon as that was pointed out you shift goalposts.
Oh God, that’s awful. Thanks for the context.
How can a privacy-focused search engine block Tor? You probably should remove those.
I should have specify, that they don’t block only tor. They block malicious traffic.
Tor traffic is not necessarily vicious traffic…
If 94% of traffic from a given source is malicious, and I don’t have a good way of differentiating the 6% that is good, I might just end up blocking 100% to keep my site stable.
Just another example of bad actors making it so we can’t have nice things.
Probably some govt somewhere:
“Protests are malicious. Dissent is illegal. Free-thought/expression is dangerous”
Agreed, it feels like it’s a strong signal they don’t take privacy seriously.
Maybe add ecosia.org to the list, definitely a privacy focused search engine.
searx and searxng are not search engines, and searx is more private (searxng collects info from users, which searx never wanted to). AFAIK duckduckgo is neither a search engine on its own, it uses blink…
To tell the truth, only yacy and sightnet have own index(database). Others are meta-search engines. They work like proxy. It’s called meta search. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine)
Mojeek has it’s own index. DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Brave have a partial index mixed with meta search results.
I think Qwant does too, right?
Yes, Qwant uses bing api(like ddg).
Just looked it up since I was sure I had read they had their own. On their wikipedia article it says:
so I guess it’s both bing and their own thing.
So, ddg and brave also have own indices. But i dont think, that it is matter, anyway they send data to 3rd party services.
I wish more of them would support duckduckgo’s bang system, brave seems to, but that’s about it. Idealogically I find the idea of using brave troublesome because of a) Eich’s transphobia, and b) the cryptobro factor (although I don’t think the search page has an embedded miner, at least not from the cursory glance I took
Firefox supports bangs natively, you can also change or add your own shortcuts.