I will use Qwant in the future but at the minute it's not suitable (IMO) for daily usage.
Ecosia seems like a great idea, but these kind of 'Search and earn' sites have always seemed like a scam to me and I can't find any reason to trust Ecosia over DDG.
This topic with DDG is recurring since years. You cannot verify the infrastructure, it is not hosted on EU-bounded servers and they have been asked for cooperation. Nothing moved as far I follow.
With Ecosia you are right. The point is that Ecosia accountable to European Law in case of scam. You can trust germans to close down the service if ever deemed to be a scam.
If I may ask, was it hacked, you lost the domain or you have put that content there on purpose to generate some revenue?
In the old days was just used for hosting a blog and some papers to share with others. I guess nowadays having a personal domain becomes increasingly less needed.
Sorry "vultures" took it over, I would use something like GitHub/GitLab pages if you are looking for minimum maintenance.
Depending on company size/challenge, you might do some tests on their claims from the outside over the period of 24 months. For example, registering an account and then verifying if that one-time email got leaked into some other service.
Or, on cases of higher-criticality you will have monitoring of what data is coming out from the datacenter where the apps are running.
Direct access to source code reviews is rare. Albeit depending on the level of cooperation it could be a possibibility.
And, which European search engine would you recommend?
Why would you argue this? Adtech companies are one of the big sources of problems with privacy online.
While sharing coffee with a colleague years ago, he argued that something smelled odd about them. In is opinion was a front for the CIA or some other sponsored group that harvests data.
Mind you that he provided no facts to support this claim.
I tried to inform myself as much as possible about them, about their technology and people working there. Very scarce info exists. Try it by yourself, then let me know if you do manage to find more info about them.
My only recommendation at the moment is qwant on the european side. Not because of privacy, but mostly to enable diversity of choice on the continent. In case of war or embargo, consequences here would be devastating on the tech-side.
Which company would accept (and pay for that) given there's no legal requirement for it?
Here's a better test: DDG sets exactly one cookie in my browser, with a short value (not unique enough to track anything). Makes me trust them more than some BS popup saying "we care about your privacy"
I don't see why I wouldn't trust DDG in relation to their alternatives
Maybe relevant for a company whose business model is built around the promise of preserving end-user privacy?
> I don't see why
Data storage and network communication occurring inside the European space alone, rather than sending packets from European users to elsewhere unknown. Being fully accountable to European law, with base offices and employees in Europe so they are subject to the same data-protection rules as other locally-based companies.
When looking at other alternatives such as Ecosia, Qwant: they do offer this and yet are seldom presented as a search engine option by Android. Strange.
W.r.t. them I agree, but have they been subject to a 3rd party audit (honest question, I'm not familiar with them)?
I'm not saying we should trust DDG (or any search engine) 100% without proof, but the best way of keeping your privacy is not collecting data and it seems DDG is doing that.
Because unless you have evidence they're abusing their data collection (as, you know, a lot of websites do) I'm not buying the FUD.
DDG is a tiny company that owes its small measure of success to building and maintaining a good reputation among devs and other tech-savvy, privacy-conscious users.
This a million times. For the same reasons why I don't trust proprietary (closed source) crypto software.
Which is essentially Bing[1], including the ads[2].
[1]: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206153381-Where...
[2]: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206019452-How-d...
Why not the opposite? It is easier for the government to seize your data if the service is under their jurisdiction.
Companies that are US-based can be depended upon to leak like a sieve with very little prompting. Given that, the EU option is the smart option. In the EU, there is at least a modicum of accountability and some expectation in the law (in theory but more importantly in practice) that people are respected and left alone.
Ecosia is just repackaged Bing, ostensibly with a second filter/ranking pass over Bing's results iirc. Is there much difference between the two from an end-user perspective, beyond the ecology gimmick?
Qwant is far bigger. Aims to be a complete replacement for Google in Europe with their own datasets. They have difficulties in funding and their survival is mostly depending on public funding and eventually being accepted as default choice for companies across Europe.
From that perspective, it makes a huge difference when more people become aware that independent options exist.
Plenty of pictures and distracting news on the front page.
As for Qwant, it says it's based in France but I know nothing about it.
Just from the face of it, it's not clear that these solutions are better (Qwant is a maybe and Ecosia is a definitely not). This ambiguity coupled with their relatively unknown nature could be one reason why the EU did what it has done.
https://m.nextinpact.com/brief/en-septembre-2019--les-result...
Strange thing is that the domain qwant.eu is for sale.
DDG's advantage is much less bloat and almost as good results as Google (in some areas arguably better), while not feeding their personalized ad machine. Qwant is worth trying as well.
DDG Marketing.
Over the years they continue to refuse access for a trusted third-party auditor to review their infrastructure and validate (or not) their claims of privacy.
The preference of Android to place DDG in Europe (31 out of 31 countries) is strange when considering privacy as argument. Then is placed this "info.com" as second option on all European countries (31 out of 31 countries) which is virtually unheard about, and again a US-based service which again raises eyebrows on privacy.
Europe-wide has a search engine that deserves our preference, and that is http://qwant.com
Precisely because it is built and hosted in Europe. Yet, it is displayed as the last option and only as an option for 8 out of 31 european countries. Very strange. Talking from Germany, the preference here would be http://ecosia.com