You're completely right, Big Tech gets away with a lot - including collecting/selling a ton of data to make profit. That's because their revenue model is based on behavioral advertising. For Startpage it's always been based on contextual advertising. And, you don't need personal data for that.

And, it happens that System1 is interested in "capturing" that revenue from contextual advertising.

"System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data," the company said. "The reason a company like System1 openly owns other search engines and consumer tech products like Info.com and Mapquest is that they want to capture that ad revenue that is slowly shifting to private search engines. There has been a steady increase in people using private search engines and therefore a steady increase in their revenue. It is a growing market that they feel will continue to thrive and grow." (https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...)

That being said: At the end of the day, it all comes back to trust. Even with OSS, you have to trust that they won't change the code. And, you should use products that you trust to best protect your privacy.

You really like to shill startpage for some reason despite a search engine needing 0 advertisements?

As mentioned above - I'm a Startpage employee. I know quite a bit about the subject so I jump in when it comes up.

Advertising on a search engine is main form of revenue > pays employees > updates > keeps current users and gets new users. You could make the argument for crowd sourcing, but it doesn't always work.

Interesting. I'm happy startpage gets revenue, whatever it is. I think I'll keep using ddg and a searx instance.