I miss those old images that would show you your IP address and ISP name, which were generated dynamically based on the request. They were designed just to be a bit frightening. But, because they were rendered on the server side, there was definitely nothing stopping them from recording your IP address too.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/
Read about Kagi’s origin story and The Age of Pagerank is Over blog post, which serves as our manifesto.
https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
Previously posted at kagi.ai on a page titled “Our Manifesto”
Kagi doesn’t just add optional AI features, they are an AI-first company that wants to turn search into an AI agent. They wrote a manifesto about it.
Maybe manifestos aren’t worth much anymore, what’s with Mozilla abandoning theirs, but I tend to believe a company when they tell me what they are.
The nice thing about Fennec is you don’t have to accept a Mozilla license to use it, and those Mozilla services are (AFAIK) disabled by default. In fact, when I look at their settings menu, there is no “data collection” section to speak of.
The not-so-nice thing about Fennec is a little while back, it just didn’t receive any updates. For something like a month.
Just about every browser that’s based on Firefox is going to be slower to update than mainline Firefox, with perhaps the exception of Tor and Mullvad because they work hand in hand.
If I were you, I would just shutter everything about the account except for the Minecraft license. Especially because, if you create a new account to play Minecraft, Microsoft is eventually going to ask you to provide identifying information like a phone number anyway. (At least, this has been my experience.)
I don’t think there’s the best answer here, but that’s what I would do.
What are the chances that your account then gets marked as “insecure” unless Google can effectively figure out who you are?
The corporation doesn’t have to stifle 100% of their criticism, they just need to disseminate enough of a counternarrative, with PR statements that are technically true enough, to overpower the criticism so that it no longer matters.
(Plus, based on your last comment, I know you already have a “they can moderate anything they feel like” response lined up, if they do start clamping down even harder where they can.)
The most significant quote is from Proton itself, which made an official statement in favor of Republican and JD Vance.
I haven’t seen many people simply post archives to the now-deleted contents of what Proton said, which is pretty damning in its own right. Before Proton realized their mistake, started erasing their original replies, and crafting a much less damning-looking narrative.
I’ve reviewed the article that tries to ascertain Andy Yen’s politics (as if doing this would have been less weird if it was unabashed love of Democrats) and I agree it’s pretty bad in several ways.
tl;dr it’s malicious “link device” QR codes that are targeted at people, which I’ve read about already. Hopefully, if anyone sees one of these messages in the wild, it would be relatively easy to ignore, because Signal makes you jump through extra hoops if you attempt to scan it with your phone.
If you open your phone’s camera app and point it at one of these malicious QR codes, Signal can/will open it, and then show you a notification:
To link a desktop or iPad to this Signal account, go to Linked Devices and tap “Link a New Device” and scan the QR code again. Make sure you only scan QR codes that come directly from Signal."
You can then jump into the Linked Devices page and scan the code again, if you choose. But the original QR code you scanned doesn’t go anywhere, far as I can tell.
It’s still kind of bad. You can format bullet points better by having a space between the bullet and the text. Then you don’t have to double-space everything.
It’s also pretty easy to test changes by using the Preview buttons available in most client, as far as I’ve seen
Isn’t it illegal to lock privacy behind a paywall?
… It seems like it might not be.
https://iapp.org/news/a/pay-or-consent-personalized-ads-the-rules-and-whats-next/
Touche. I didn’t realize how many of the links in Tuta’s blog post were to their own blog.
Very good point in this article that third-party cookies can be deleted but fingerprinting - like fingerprints themselves - cannot be. And quoting Google in 2019 before they decided to be even more evil than they are now.
This might be the best article I’ve seen about the change, and it’s posted on a company blog.
I have found a Vlad to be frank, but not transparent. Big difference.
I agree with you that transparency is a positive trait, which is why I was frustrated when he made his website less transparent after people complained about the Yandex partnership.
I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about [Kagi hiding their sources], though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi’s attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.
This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care.
I hope you’d agree that hiding information is the opposite of being transparent about it!
I agree that legally binding documents, or at least official statements made on the blog, probably carry more weight than the CEO shooting the shit on random social media, but the CEO’s words aren’t meaningless. When trust is involved (and before today, trust was extremely important), it means a whole lot.
BTW, to be picky, neither is privacy. Privacy is not lack of information, privacy is information only accessed by authorized parties. A service that collects data and uses it only for the purpose you agree with (not formally in the sense of 300 pages, really) is still private.
I agree with you halfway here, because privacy is very difficult to define. But I think what you just described IMO is security… plus transparency. For example, Gmail is technically very secure! Your email is safe between you, the recipient, and Google. And you technically consented to Google reading your email. Google has a vested interest in keeping your data to themselves, since leaking it would benefit their competitors. But I agree with you that Google, through its obfuscation, is not giving you privacy.
But I would argue that even if Google was totally honest and understandable, it would still never be private!
I don’t have a good definition for privacy yet, but generally speaking, privacy is when data is withheld from a third party, despite the third party’s facilitation of a service. If the third party is malicious, or the third party is compromised, I want my privacy to remain intact. With the Google example, if Google’s security is compromised, my privacy is explicitly out the window. With something like Signal, my privacy is retained.
BTW asking why a feature is important is not paternalistic, and it is done on basically every post there. And why wouldn’t it be? If they need to decide to invest their limited resources they should know why customers want something, people ask all kind of stuff.
I strongly believe that choosing to withhold information after being criticized about it, and putting the burden onto the end user to prove why the information is necessary, is paternalistic.
I believe the reverse is true: if a corporation chooses to start with holding information that was previously transparent, they should give a damn good reason why they suddenly felt the need to clam up!
I don’t know if you are familiar with the blog post that started an absolute firestorm about Kagi, but I did follow the blogger and it turns out that, if you believe their observations without explicit citation, Vlad has a history of shifting the burden of proof onto the consumer for why they would dare question his service, versus simply providing a service that is as transparent and private as possible.
[A] person wanted to know what LLMs Kagi uses so they would know where their data was being sent. Vlad wouldn’t answer, whining about how “no other business is held to that standard”…
Thinking of their products as privacy focused is a complete smokescreen because they refuse to actually PROVE themselves to be private in any way. They want you to take their word for it…
I don’t think this makes Vlad particularly malicious. In fact, his behavior is in itself a bit transparent (although I find it frustrating that he prefers to use communication channels that are either private or under his personal control, which may easily either be coincidence or intentional).
But I don’t want to be exclusively critical. Because this, the content of the linked post, is exactly what I wanted from Kagi. It looks like they implemented a method where they cannot snoop on searches, even if they felt compelled to do so (either due to external pressure or internal malice). That’s the stuff that matters to me. (And Vlad, if you somehow come across this: do more of this, please.)
What’s wrong with the comment? A couple obvious things stick out
1. Not understanding the definition of privacy
When it comes to privacy, third parties “knowing everything about you” is not privacy. Signal is private, Facebook Messenger is not. DuckDuckGo is private, Google is not. There is, and never has been, anything private about a service that directly ties every single search you make to the account that makes it.
(And despite replying to comment calling it anonymity back then - and Vlad calling it anonymity himself - today’s announcement recontextualizes it as a privacy feature.)
2. Explicit paternalism is creepy
The CEO compares his company to your parents, in a positive, “I would do nothing to harm you” way. Leaving aside the fact that many people have terrible experiences with their families and the violation of their privacy throughout their life (perhaps Vlad was extremely lucky), this is a disturbing way to describe his corporation in relation to you. Kagi has inherent power and knowledge that you, the figurative child, simply do not possess.
It might sound like I’m reaching here a bit, but there is a strange paternalism that runs through much of Kagi’s messaging.
This is uncomfortable stuff. Daddy does not inherently know best, let alone a CEO. If a company wants to keep its reputation for privacy, transparency is paramount. Removing transparency because of, perhaps, an inferred lack of intelligence on the consumer side is… Not good.
Given the way Kagi CEO Vladimir Prelovac doesn’t understand the word privacy, hopefully this solution is implemented in a way where the word’s true definition cannot be distorted.
Here he is a few years ago, comparing his company to your parents:
We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
This comment lives rent free in my head, and has been a privacy deficit that Kagi had created and failed to address… until today.
Pebble was from a time when enshittifiaction wasn’t as terrible as it is today, and died (post acquisition) before it could really be implemented in its products. Eric Migicovsky is an odd duck in that regard. Between this and Beeper, privacy has always been “not great, not malicious (yet)”, and before enshittifiaction could set in under his watch, the company gets bought out by a bigger one with a truly lousy CEO.
Under his watch. Heh.
Pebble was possibly one of the last great tech innovations before AI, in its desperate attempt to sell our stolen data back to us in a thoroughly butchered format. Which means it pains me to read
Personal home labs might be able to go much further with this, I hope.
Considering how popular this product originally was with hackers and open source enthusiasts, I really hope the hardware has as much longevity as its predecessor. And considering that was closed source and got so much mileage, I have the feeling that this will be better simply by how open-source works.