Well, they do promise it’s secure! Which means… Nothing, absolutely nothing in terms of privacy.

How much useless space can a program take up before we are allowed to complain about it

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It won’t hurt to try disabling both of them! Watch for non-functional notifications, make sure the most crucial apps in your arsenal work, see what happens.

Either is pretty good. If you’re looking for more diverse options I’d recommend 4get or a half decent Whoogle or SearxNG instance.

But you’re right that you do have to trust the person or group running it, and I think Mullvad has the upper hand there. It’s big enough to attract a crowd, and its caching means the results are extra generic too.

If you’re looking just for Google results, Startpage is… Fine, I think.

Running a VPN makes any of these options much better.

Qwant doesn’t prioritize privacy very well, besides leaning on its European-ness. Their privacy policy does not engender trust with me.

https://lemm.ee/comment/19796261

But as soon as you do Proton Mail + VPN, you then go with Proton Unlimited and that is what makes the most sense financially.

That’s how they get you! ;)

Mail and VPN are something I would never want to cross associate, though. After all, any mail provider can see the full contents of any unencrypted email at some point (including Proton), and any VPN provider can see as much as your ISP used to see about your internet activity.

I’m of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.

But on the other hand, if it’s a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don’t have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your “VPN” for searches.

It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.

I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft

https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

There’s also this bizarre section

If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…

Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.

Amazing how your post history illustrates you only care about one topic. Like the last time I saw one of your posts:

These articles are getting so obscure, that you probably had to peel through a good amount of stuff that people here would find way more relevant.

And based on other articles from this same website, they are American exceptionalists. And not competent about technology. Here is another article of theirs, “how autocrats weaponize AI”, which was published last month and refuses to mention the Trump administration among their list of autocrats.

The article is also extremely stupid, misrepresenting how Signal works.

Encryption apps like Signal use AI to ensure secure communication and protect activists from government surveillance.

I don’t know what the author was smoking when they wrote that, but Signal does not use any AI.

Edit: …a decentralized Monero exchange

There’s the Monero shilling I expect in every comment

My YouTube alternative: still YouTube, but I screw them out of ad revenue with a dedicated account and third party apps

I see what you did there

It’s been a while since I watched a documentary about him, but apparently it was both… Either way, incredibly horrid treatment.

I blame 4chan’s constant harassment of the man for his speech and early death. They invaded his live streams and gaslit him into believing, among other things, that he was in a relationship with someone else. Collectively, I think they’re responsible for his suicide.

“Ford, last I checked, was not a bastion of the left.”

The Ford Foundation is located in New York City at the Center for Social Justice

The Ford Foundation is one of the primary foundations offering grants that support and maintain diversity in higher education

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Ford+foundation

cc @SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca

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the vast majority of the comments just read what the op wrote and not what was said

What part of my post isn’t something he said

Just keep in mind: your upvotes on Lemmy are visible to anybody who runs a Lemmy instance.

God help us if Elon Musk figures out how to run one.

ETA: I mention this because the current government wants to find anyone who does this.

The [unelected president] moaned on his platform that some Reddit users on the subreddit r/WhitePeopleTwitter had broken the law after they allegedly revealed the identities of his so-called DOGE goon squad.

Is this for human beings, or is it for Google to show their investors to prove that AI is totally going to revolutionize something eventually?

Screw Google either way, I’m not going to use their search engine either way, but this doesn’t feel like a product they are genuinely committed to releasing. Maybe I’m wrong, and in that case, screw them even more.