Re:Kagi Search API
by BadHumans on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @03:52PM
(#42311256)
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.
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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.