They say they don't, we can't know if it's true or not.

You're right, but you can't be sure of anything in a greater sense.

The only thing we can do is vote with our wallet if we see that they have lied all the way.

This will only lead us to Russel's teapot [0].

BTW, their current privacy policy is at [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

[1]: https://kagi.com/privacy

Voting with our wallet doesn't work, because we can't know if they lie or not.

Have they made a Ulysses Pact to enforce their position?

We could of course also enact a robust regulatory state with the ability to audit and enforce these things, but we've decided against that it seems.

I don't know where you're from, but on this side of the pond we have GPDR.

How is GDPR enforced though? With enough disregard for the law, the service provider can just lie about the data they have. I don’t know of a mechanism where you can actually force an audit to confirm that. You can basically ask the provider for all the data they have about you, but you can’t find out if they’re lying.

In the US, we don't.

the teapot analogy actually falls on kagi to provide proof.

and i doubt mean a non biding privacy policy. heck metabook and google both always had one saying the same thing

Google was showing my search history since forever, and they never claimed to not storing it?

what google have to do with this?

Everything is based on trust. How do you know that your phone is not sending your browser history once per month at random time at night, along with random legitimate-looking service?

My phone's software is open source, kagi (and the others) aren't.

By running an open source OS for which I can confirm the contents of all outgoing connections.

You can hope, but even then processor microcode is likely closed source.

And you cannot really confirm the above use case very well. What if it is so sophisticated that it knows when it is being monitored, or it is so random or well hidden, that it might take years to spot.

What is that? Even your custom android build will have some binary blobs for your SoC.

We are just doomed.

"currently" is doing some heavy lifting there (right proper to state it that way).

Is there an enforceable claim that Kagi will never store such info?

The making an account for searching linked to govt-verifiable payment and ID data, however ephemerally, is also a high bar for me (and for women in the US with the incoming administration's focus on over-regulating pregnancy outcomes, holy fork NO)

You can pay with crypto, if that helps.

If the government really wanted to, they can just get SSL private keys from CAs and decrypt all the traffic no matter who you search with, anyway. It's probably only a matter of time...