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Privacy @lemmy.ml

nof4n @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Privacy Search Engines

P2P:

YaCy
SightNet (is under development)

70 comments

How can a privacy-focused search engine block Tor? You probably should remove those.
- Agreed, it feels like it's a strong signal they don't take privacy seriously.
- lol I commented w/o checking comments.
  The reason I stopped using StartPage is because the blocked me on Tor, and also with site: operator from the URL bar.
- I should have specify, that they don't block only tor. They block malicious traffic.
  
  Tor traffic is not necessarily vicious traffic...

Maybe add ecosia.org to the list, definitely a privacy focused search engine.
- Ok, i'll add it. Thanks.

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.
- An embedded miner? Are you insinuating that the browser has an embedded miner?

Didn’t brave have some scandals. Idk that’s when I stopped using it
- Their CEO donates money to anti-LGBT causes.
  
  Source? I know some peeps who use brave who would like to know this.
  
  I didn't even realise brave was a search engine as well as browser. Anyways after i found out he was a prick i stopped using the brave browser and switched to mullvad's
- 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:
  ... Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.
  On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance
  In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
  In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
- 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)

My take on it - if they block Tor can we really call it private?

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.
- Fucking called it, years ago.

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)
  
  Brave search uses their own indexing for text results (image and maybe a few other resources fall back to google). Note: I don’t use Brace, but just wanted to be fair.
  
  iirc Mojeek also has it's own database
  
  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?

Leta if you’re a Mullvad customer. Not quite a search engine in its on own right but a anonymous proxy onto Google
- I don't like it. You need to login to use it.
  Like, I don't believe they'll do something bad, but it's still bad IMO.
  
  Valid

kagi is privacy focused (as is their browser, Orion). However, search is not free and requires a subscription.
For me, it's the first search engine to actually replace Google. The results are a lot more relevant than sites like DuckDuckGo. !g used to be a daily thing for me, but I can count on one hand the number times I've invoked it in the last three months.
- Question, how do we know that DuckDuckGo is safe? They openly advertise on billboards and other places, so where is this money coming from and why is it spent on advertising?

What do you guys think about Presearch (link to the search engine)? I've been using it for some weeks now and all in all I'm pretty satisfied.

Why is Ecosia on the list?
Quoting from tosdr.org:
This service can view your browser history
This service may collect, use, and share location data
This service allows tracking via third-party cookies for purposes including targeted advertising
This service tracks which web page referred you to it
Your personal data is given to third parties
Doesn't look privacy-respecting.

I would remove Qwant from this list, because they share your data with Bing, their privacy policy have contradicting statements and include:
Qwant may transfer to this partner the following pseudonymous data related to your query:
– The keywords of the search;
– Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent);
– The first three bytes of your IP address;
– The approximate geographical area from which the search originated, at the level of a region or city;
– The salt hash generated from your IP address, your User Agent and a salt that changes at the latest every 3 months;
– A random token generated by Qwant.
..Qwant may also collect and transfer to this partner your full IP address.
This processing is in the legitimate interest of Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited (article 6.1.f) to secure and make its services more reliable.
This data is transferred to this partner within the European Union, and may be retained in accordance with Bing’s Privacy Policy for a maximum period of 18 months.
Please, also review this if you plan to use qwant:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Controversies

No love for the best one? Kagi is really good.

One to add is Kagi.
It’s paid only. They literally don’t track searches (they may allow history in the future).
You need a login and email to sign up but the email can be fake (I probably wouldn’t reccomend that)
And if you do a lot of programming it’s honestly better than some mentioned.
Again it’s paid because there’s no ads. You are literally supporting the product and devs.
It does have bangs like DDg. You can even exclude domains from being returned if you want. And each result gives you things like trackers etc.
It’s quite nice. I moved off DDG several months ago and haven’t looked back.
Note: it’s not necessarily cheap, buts it’s been a solid value add for me. I do a lot of research and searching for work.

Brave seems to work for me

As others have stated, you are mixing search engines with metasearch engines here. If you employ browser isolation and obscure your IP address, you can be anonymous with any engine.
Yacy has potential, and I run an instance. It relies on us operators to index sites. You will find results to be incomplete in many areas, but it can be great for researching controversial topics. When I want uncensored and not manipulated results, I also use Yandex.com and Brave.

Man I loved duckduckgo until they stopped working with DarkReader about a month ago. So now every time I do a search, I'm blinded by a large white screen lol. Even setting their dark theme option doesn't persist between sessions (for me) so I had to move on... Brave was what I went to but I'm not enjoying it too much. Thanks for this list, it gives me some other options to look into if I end up not liking Leta 👀
- PrivAU

70 comments