If you don’t know how to read code, then you pretty much have to trust them, and all other open-source software out there. The good thing with FOSS is that there’s probably someone who cares about it enough to read it and audit it, although there can also be a chance that no knowledgeable person cares about the code so no one ends up actually knowing what it’s doing.
I don’t know how to read code, so I pretty much have to trust all of the FOSS that I use. Although open-source is usually more trustworthy than proprietary counterparts (read: PRISM)
I found this on my privacy journey. Don’t know how relevant it is today though
If you want to give it a shot I would recommend you use Podman Desktop. What I did was I just followed the instructions from the SearXNG page until I had to run it. Afterwards I would just add it to Podman Desktop. Then enter the settings to set a localhost. You can use 8080 in the localhost setting. After that I would just press run and it would start. On firefox or whatever browser you want, now enter localhost:8080
in the search bar and you have your very own searxng
I’ll just throw another tool to the mix: https://prism-break.org/en/
I’d say it all depends on the user’s threat model. Seeing that part of the younger generation (myself included) are getting more caught up in technology and getting more interested in technology, in time there will be so many people using ad blockers (in fact, there already are a lot of people using ad blockers) that services like google will have to resort to other means of profit. While they try to find a solution, they will try to mitigate the thing that is preventing them from making enough profit in the meantime. In this case, adblocks. Privacy-respecting products are a thing, and some of them being used and trusted by huge corporations (an example would be Nextcloud, which is free to use).
To reclaim privacy is a very hard thing to do, but it was always meant to be this way, whether people like it or not, what drives the world is money, and user data is very profitable in today’s day and age
Luckily, there are things people can do to reclaim their privacy. It is indeed impossible to reclaim 100% of it, but people have the choice to steer away from massive surveillance that happens everywhere. Privacy is a human right that got taken away, but it can be reclaimed. People can be in control
by the same logic, they won’t know what you do inside Tails, nor when you boot it up