This is more recent:

> There is no more incentive to collect, misuse, or otherwise do anything with user data. In fact, for Kagi, user data is a liability. We don’t want it. We have nothing useful to do with it. You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account. But other than that, there is really no incentive for Kagi to ever want to touch your data.

https://blog.1password.com/real-cost-search-engines-intervie...

I don't think Kagi, at the moment, is doing anything nefarious with the data that they have. But that paragraph you quoted is pure marketing.

>You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account.

If data was really viewed as a liability, they would adopt a data minimization model similar to Mullvad and not tie user accounts and email addresses together at all.

With Mullvad, privacy and anonymization are the goal and with Kagi it is more of a side effect. As such, using email for accounts makes the most sense because it is the default way of doing things and the lowest lift.

They could offer both. There’s no reason you can’t use some sort of uuid to login to your account. If that uuid was lost, well, tough shit and make a new account I guess?

Then normies can login with email and everyone is happy!

I don't think they verify email so you can do that currently with a fake email. There is nothing stopping you from creating a Kagi account with [email protected] other the possibility of someone actually having that email.

That's totally fine! But that runs counter to the claim that "[...] data is a liability. We don't want it.".

If they really didn't want it, there are options.

I think the million data breaches with no consequences have shown that email is not a liability.

"Data breaches don't have consequences" is a new take that I'm not sure how to respond to.

It's not the email alone that is valuable. It is the email paired with your search history that is valuable. If you remove the email, and instead tie to to a uuid, the search history is much less valuable. This is the basics of data minimization.

Which, again, is fine if Kagi doesn't want to do. They just shouldn't pretend that there isn't any other solution other than email, because there is.

> "Data breaches don't have consequences" is a new take that I'm not sure how to respond to.

That is not what I said. Hundreds of data breaches where emails have gotten leaked and there have been no real consequences for the offending company so from a company perspective, email is not data that carries any real liability.

>email is not data that carries any real liability.

It certainly can be when it is tied to other data. For example, your entire search history.

I don't understand their assertion; Kagi has an incentive to collect data... Most companies do. The incentive is money. Kagi would not be the first company to collect data to monetize it later. And Kagi dreams big about all that data:

Instead of being scared to share information with [your search engine], you will chose what data you want it to have and volunteer your data only after knowing its incentives align with yours... The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so!

https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over