If we can't trust DuckDuckGo, which one then? According to this post, we can't trust DDG anymore. I'm totally frustrated, because I thought DDG is finally a great search engine that respects privacy. Which search engine can we trust then? Is the solution to use something like https://yacy.net ? Or is there another way to save search the web without beeing stalked, tracked and sucked? Our world is so messed up... :-( |
The question is how to hide your online fingerprint
Everyone is your enemy, you can only count on yourself, either self host a crawler
Or use the most popular one, if results aren't good, check with another one
Remove your dependencies, and change your identity
Anything else is USELESS, expecting a VC funded company in the USA will care for your privacy, is like asking for a thief to not rob you
Google gives 0 shit about you, you are just data, manipulate it
But it's so cumbersome to increase the "walls of privacy" endlessly, when privacy is our right. But that's the world we live in, right?
Let's say I use the following to protect myself, my fingerprint - there are questionmarks too to use them:
TOR: - I read that a huge fleet of exit nodes are bad. Probably the Gov. who's paying Millions to infiltrate the network. So, can I really hide my ass using TOR?
VPN: - Same as with any other service. You must trust them that they respect your privacy, don't save data etc.
Blockers/Firerwalls: - One needs technical skills to configure it properly. Luckily I'm able to, but millions of ordianry people don't.
It never ends.
So we have to do our part on our side and learn to live with it, and handle technology better than they do.
Thanks for your comment, very much appreciated.
Or another approach: use multiple search engines + an anonymous proxy. Spread your searches among Qwant, Mojeek, Ecosia, Yacy, Swisscows, etc
I like the idea of selfhosting and the proxy.
Thank you very much.
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
Usually, when something online is "free", follow the _real_ money: which advertisment company is making money out of it? is user data sold to brokers? is there a fund behind it financing (vanguard/blackrock/etc)?
It looks good, but behind the curtain...
Thanks for your feedback.
Well, that was how it looked at the time. As I said, I dunno how it ended, if it did.
One can even contribute by hosting a server if I understand this correct.
I'l check it out. Thanks very much.
Tor browser also has an incognito/private mode, at least on my Lineage Android and Ubuntu desktop. Set a desktop shortcut to incognito, and never use the mode that retains cookies.
Google does not like to talk to exit nodes, and will throw lots of captchas. If you want to search with Google on Tor, use startpage.com instead.
DDG, Ecosia, and others are really just Bing in disguise.
I'm not sure how friendly some of the other boutique search engines are to Tor. Malicious actors can use exit nodes to launch attacks, although I think safeguards have improved over the years.
I wrote an article on Tor for Linux and Android a few years back, and it has some more detail that might be useful. Let me know if you want the url.