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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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Is Brave Search trustworthy? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I heard a lot of bad stuff about Brave and their CEO lately and am now unsure if the search engine is any good? Do they censor stuff? Is any data collected? Can it be considered private?

If you'd not recommend it, what are good alternatives and why? I was a long time duckduckgo user before, so anything similar to it or brave search would be great. I'm not into self hosting.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ive been enjoying the results I get through qwant.com searches; its not perfect but feels more like older Google (before enshittification)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm using startpage.com and I'm kind of trying to leave the Google influence but not at the cost of efficency.

I hate so far the results provided by brave, ddg, and ecosia.

But this one... It looks promising.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I'm a human each time I searched for anything.

Have you also heard of SearXNG?

I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, I'm familiar with SearXNG, but every time I tried searching for something complex on different instances, I would encounter the following error: "Sorry! we didn't find any results. Please use another query or search in more categories." I genuinely appreciate what they're trying to accomplish with that project, but I'm not in a position to test something if it doesn't demonstrate the same efficiency as a established product. Let's say I can't afford to be a beta tester right now.

To a lesser extent, I had a similar experience with Brave, as its results align more with what I expect from Google (and therefore, StartPage).

DuckDuckGo, when I tried using it as an alternative, never provided me with better results than what StartPage offered. I'd love for it to work for me, but I simply end up spending more time there than on other search engines.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A trick I've learned for when this happens with SearXNG is to add "!web" to the search query. It provides a wider range of search engines and images, which specific ones can be selected in the settings. Like all things software, it takes a bit to adjust to a new interface but SearXNG allows users to control a lot more of the functionality.