Privacy

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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.

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What search engine should I use? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 month ago by bpt11@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I used google for most of my life, for the past couple months I’ve been using brave search, but I still end up using google often because google images is far better than brave search images. I’m also worried that maybe brave search isn’t the best choice. What would you guys recommend?

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[–] shreddy_scientist@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In 2019, the advertising/data science company System1 became the majority owner of Startpage. Based on this, I'd say it's worth finding an alternative to Startpage.

[–] Ballissle@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh really? I'll look more into that thanks.

I saw people mentioning an open source and self hostable search engine (SearXNG) which is cool and I tried it out but it gives not very good results. I tried searching for specific sites and it would show anything but. But it's fine for general info.

I still don't think there is anything else other than startpage that is as private while giving good search results. I don't believe that startpage is collecting data on users like google/Microsoft do and I don't think duckduckgo is as good in that regard either. It still makes sense for startpage to be owned by an advertising company since it does show ads mixed with the search results. The difference is they are not personalised or tracked to you (so they say).

So if you have any evidence of System1/startpage tracking users and collecting personalised data on users for anything other than general usage and diagnostic analytics then I think it's fine. If you do, then I will stop using and recommending it.