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.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I've been trying to find a good privacy respecting browser, but I can't really decide on what to use. I don't like the search results with Brave Search. DuckDuckGo shares my information with Microsoft and SearchXNG shows me NSFW images even with strict search on. I really like Presearch, but I'm not really sure what they're about.
EDIT: After tinkering with the settings of my SearXNG instance, it seems to have reduced the amount of NSFW images. I think I will stick with SearXNG for now.
It seemed extremely sketchy to me, most results were from other engines and it was embracing some weird crypto.
Not sure about the privacy of Presearch but their results are really good. A few times already I was searching for something I know existed out there and only Presearch was able to find it.
What does DDG share with Microsoft?
It's probably not that big of a deal, but I just don't want anything to do with Microsoft.
I trust a search engine if I can turn JS off and still get results.
I just use Duckduckgo Lite with Ublock Origin, NoScript, LocalCDN, Libredirect, and Chameleon extensions on hardened Firefox fork.
A self hosted Searxng would also be a good option though.
I like DDG lite a lot, but I need to be able to search for images :c
You can still use lite and then use bangs. !ddgi myimagesearch will immediately redirect you to ddg images. Duckduckgo has a plethora of useful quick search shortcuts called Bangs. Even if you don't use lite, bangs are worth looking into inho.
So they only share when you click on an ad. I use an adblocker anyway, so effectively they're not sharing anything. Or do I misunderstand?
I think it’s more of a trust issue.
Exactly. It's sorta like all or nothing. If they share this, go figure what else. And maybe you misunderstood or missed some other parts.
You can combine search engine of choice with anonymity provided by TOR browser.
How can you make SearXNG work without problems? I've tried only one instance (not enough time) but searching for the game "Borderlands 2" (so nothing unknown) it randomly gives me
Sorry!
No results were found. You can try to:
I use these instances: https://search.inetol.net/ https://search.hbubli.cc/ It's working great so far. The only issue im having is that it pulls Chinese results every once in a while.
It was doing that for me so often that it became unusable for me.
You can just tell it not to search Chinese engines.
I can only say good things about kagi. They let you adjust your search results according to how much you trust a given source, and the business model makes sense. You pay them, they give you a service. Heck, if you pay for unlimited searches, they have an actual incentive to make you search less and make you find results quickly
Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral "business as usual":
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo
Another $10 subscription just to browse the web.. I don't think it's for me.
You pay with money or privacy, but pay you must. 😉
SearXNG seems to be free and private, checkmate!
If you pay for privacy, other than a vpn provider, you are a victim already
My issue is not payment itself, but rather tying all my searches to a single identity. While it seems like they resolved the issue of only accepting KYC (although the only crypto accepted is Bitcoin, which has bigger fees than Monero as well as privacy issues, and to my understanding, Lightning is harder to self-custody), the absolute linkability remains.
The best is to self host your own SearXNG metasearch engine.
Does that not defeat the point, because then they can see that the searches are coming from your location/internet?
I host my searxng instance on a hetzner vps so my ip is not leaked anywhere.
Care to explain how?
The search requests are being made on my behalf on the host (in my case, the hetzner VPS).
But they are always coming from the same IP, so you are still identifiable. If you want increased anonymity you need more people to use your instance to mix the search topics.
You can host if on a vps, use it behind a vpn, or make a whole group of people using it so you don't know from who these requests were
The vpn, sure, but if you host it on a vps (and don't make it public) then all of the requests are coming from the vps's ip. This is private, but not anonymous.
I have started using a public instance because of this.
Have you considered StartPage ?
It returns google results whilst stripping of all google tracking and does not track itself either.
There's some concern now that Startpage is majority owned by an ad company. The company says they want the ad revenue rather than the user data, but it's hard to trust that. I used to use it but moved to Searxng.
I tried Searxng but it just wasnt giving good results at all. And lacked far too many features of a modern search engine imo.
The thing is you kinda have to trust the word of all companies with how they collect your data and how they monetise themselves. I still think startpage is one of the best alternatives for privacy. Also my adblockers seem to work fine on startpage's ad links so i dont see them.
Startpage seems like a pretty good alternative. I read their privacy policy and it looks pretty solid.
whoogle is also similar