You can pay for Kagi with crypto if you want to be anonymous

Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

Unless you work at Kagi I am not taking that too seriously.

I don't Work at Kagi either, but I can ready their Privacy Policy: https://kagi.com/privacy

> Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

They also double down on this in their FAQ: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/faqs.html#i-am-still-worr...

I find their reasoning solid and choose to believe them (for now).

As you mentioned they don't track (for now).

I mean anyone can write anything into a privacy policy and who will enforce they are sticking to them really? Usually we only see what actually happens in the background when there is a breach.

For financial systems we have regular audits so rules like PCI DSS are enforced, but do we have these for search systems?

> I mean anyone can write anything into a privacy policy and who will enforce they are sticking to them really?

Dunno, but a "decent" chunk of my time went into vetting our privacy policy for my company because it is something we could be sued over.

So at least lawyers are taking it very seriously.

It looks like their privacy policy backs this up. It’s also written in plain English, which I adore.

“Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.”

https://kagi.com/privacy

Not so plain. We do not (log AND associate), or we do not log AND we don’t associate? Am I supposed to believe that if their backend crashes after a user query, that can’t tell what has been queried?

" Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account."

> Am I supposed to believe that if their backend crashes after a user query, that can’t tell what has been queried?

I'm sure they'll know the query. They just won't know which user made the query.

And here lies the problem - there’s a difference between “we have no process that associates queries and users” and “the system is specifically designed to make this association impossible”.

I do, we don't log searches.

So if the feds stop by you have nothing to hand over. That sounds great, but legally dubious. Aren't you required to keep a log?

Thanks for the info nonetheless. I think I'll give it a shot and maybe don't look up how to get rid of bodies - for a friend. Oh, damn, did it again.

IANAL nor close to it but is there any legal requirement in the US to keep logs avoid user activity besides access logs? I'd be surprised that the US federal law forces you to keep a full activity log so that they can take a look later for some reason.

Does it matter if it's a law? One day a national security letter from the FBI shows up at your doorstep, requiring you to keep logs, and forbidding you from saying you do.

For that kind of risk profile, you can't have an account anywhere (not even HN), nor a cell phone

That still requires a leap of faith to a relatively small company. Even if true, they could always secretly activate logging without your knowledge.

or get bought out by an advertising agency

Yes, spot on. Accepting that it is ok to have a gatekeeper that monitors and monetizes what the digital planet is searching was a monumental wrong turn.

There needs to be a healthy decentralized, open source approach to search. If people can hope to train and infer with LLM's locally why not the relatively "low IQ" search index that doesnt even violate copyright? The two are increasingly facets of the same thing.

Btw you should try recoll for local search.

Open source business models are not the easiest but a team could easily fund things with corporate oriented customizations.

Maybe Kagi itself should try this path.

In any case the next phase of AI enabled computing will require some bold thinking and acting, but above all, having a moral compass.

Kagi recently added support for paying with crypto. Create an account with single-use email address, pay with unKYCed crypto and search only while on VPN, if you really need to search anonymously.

Also while searching close one eye and hang upside down from a pull-up bar, to ensure you're making web searching as uncomfortable and focus-sapping as possible.