Fair enough, I am also not attached to kagi, mostly I want companies with good business models to succeed in tech. I want to see ad-revenue based companies (and all the connected industry) to crumble. A man can dream…

But yandex is useful for those who search in Russian. The low utilization probably comes from a mostly US/EU customer base, but when it is used, it is useful. I would disagree with disabling it. The best would be letting people decide what back ends to use, but that requires a whole rewrite of the search logic on their side, so it’s not happening any time soon…

BTW in EU we still use a lot of gas and oil from Russia, so it’s quite difficult to avoid giving them money (especially because we don’t know where energy came from for every product we buy).

I think their customer base is basically 90% made of people that - like me - would quit in a second.

Good thing is that there is no vendor lock, it would be a shame, but changing search engine is quite simple.

Yeah, I agree. In general I will personally try to evaluate if the good that comes from a company succeeding outweighs the fact it’s a US company. I won’t use a dogmatic approach, but I will definitely be careful to choose even more carefully than before.

At least in Europe that’s still quite impossible, who knows what their gas and oil is used to produce. Which means you might buy some european product and also give them money. Anyway, everyone has their lines and I respect that.

I think most people are unaffected from the actual data, unless they search in russian, which is useful for me as a Russian language learner for example. I mostly search grammar stuff.

I don’t know the details, so maybe there is a reason, but I am not part of the “outraged” crowd. I think kagi use case is neat and innovative, bot protection is meh

Technically you could extend that reasoning to plenty of EU countries that also send aid to Israel (e.g., Germany, where Hetzner is located, or tuta, etc.).

At some point one has to make compromises, and everyone can place the line where they wish. Considering 1000 searches per month, the price is going to be between $0.20 and $3.84 (synchronous). So let’s say $2, which is probably an order of magnitude more than the real cost. Of that 2$, the margin is maybe 1$? That 1$ becomes profit for some Kazakh company, which ultimately means $0.2 in taxes. If this was in Russia, that would be $0.018 to the federal government, but let’s say that it doesn’t matter. Of that, 40% goes in weapons, making it $0.08/month. In 1 year, that’s $0.96.

Now, as I said I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an overestimation of 10x or more, it also assumes that absolutely nothing goes to Kazakh government, which is fully used to bypass sanctions, and a 50% margin for the company. It also assumes 1000 searches (the average was around 300 if I recall correctly) and that yandex is used for each one of them.

Every cent count, absolutely, but it’s objectively such a tiny amount that a one-time donation to UA army or some humanitarian relief org will offset you for like 15 years.

Since they implemented privacy pass, there is now something stopping them from doing both. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

Obviously with it you trade the need to trust them for your own personalization (as they can’t know it was you searching).

Sure, but they don’t (their privacy policy is exemplary). They have a whole shpiel about their business model. Just few weeks back they released a feature that makes it technically impossible for them to see who did searches, so no trust is needed anymore. They implemented a very novel protocol, quite cool.

I have doubts considering they are an american company, but I want to see them succeed. Plus, they are remote, so at least a good chunk of the income taxes from salaries are going outside the US.

Why would they do what Google etc. do, but much worse? It makes sense that they do scrape what google etc. most likely miss (and that’s what their index is about). Even a company with Microsoft resources tried and failed to scrape the web as a whole (failed in the sense results are worse).

They need a buffer state from NATO

Me living in a NATO country bordering Russia.

Note, I generally agree about the fact that NATO should have been dissolved after the cold war, and since then it contributed to create the risk it was useful to mitigate. That said, the key word is contributed. Russia is an imperial power and I hope you can see how populations who were already on the receiving end of that imperialism would rather choose the far empire than risking with the close one.

Your description of the maidan events also completely lefts out the popular support, the Ukrainian perspective, the way that Yanukovich had the power in the first place, the impact of russification (also imperialism) and much more. Yes, the US was very happy and supported the maidan movement, and so did many different groups with different perspectives. However, it’s completely partial to paint that as an imperialisric US coup.

Open source analytics tools are still pushing for ad-driven business models that make the world (and the content) worse. Open source LLMs still waste computational power and pollute. And the list continues. Some open source technologies serve a good goal, some contribute to make the world as bad as some non-OSS.

Just in case, consider that “costume” has been probably used because that’s the word in Ukrainian “Костюм” (read almost the same as the English word, but with the accent on the u).

I found funnier when he said, “maybe something better”.

You can’t imagine the first time I was reading news about Slovakia, and I saw the PM called Robert Fico. I was like, Roberto Fico (Italian politician) did what now?!

Yes that’s true, and that seems quite natural. His poor communication in a tweet is not a reason to fire someone from a board, in my opinion. Especially since at the best of my knowledge he didn’t do anything that harmed the privacy of anybody, nor he showed inclination to do so.

In any case, if you find yourself “assuming” that people that have years of track record caring about privacy and similar issue “don’t care about privacy” or “are cryptonerds”, maybe you should reflect a second. This is why I said to go listen to her interview or read her pieces.

I don’t use email for any meaningful communication where I expect privacy. It is essentially the way for companies and a few other organizations to send me low priority information and/or confirm my identity to reset a password or whatever.

As a privacy enthusiast (expert seems too much), this immediately stood out. Privacy is the context of emails means that all my data which includes the content of the messages but also the metadata (who I talk to, which services I use - like in your example -, when I communicate, how often, etc.) is kept private, meaning not used for anything else than providing me the service (i.e., let me send and receive emails). From this point of view, even if you consider the content of your emails not sensitive, already the fact that you do use company X (because they sent you a password reset email) is data about you, and as such can and will be mined by Google to profile you or to sell it.

Am I risking too much if I use it as the corporate contact point that it is? Am I just letting my white/straight/cis/male privilege show through?

Nobody can tell you this, because risk in this context is purely a subjective estimation, and you are free to do what you please. However, I do care about my privacy, which means that I want to minimize the amount of data about me available for sale or to others in general. For me the motivation is quite simple, while I do block ads everywhere too and I generally don’t have an impact in terms of getting personalized ads, once the data is collected I have no idea what will be used for, by whom and for what purpose. It doesn’t even matter if the data actually allows to infer accurate things about me, it’s enough that someone (e.g., insurance company, employer, bank, government, etc.) is gullible enough to believe that inference is correct. In the book “Privacy is power” (written by Carissa Veliz) she also develops a very interesting argument about the fact that violating your privacy usually means also violating the privacy of the people near you (the people with whom you share demographic, the people you communicate with etc.). This could be another point of view to consider.

Anyway, if for you the above is fine, there is no other significant risk you are taking, and you should keep using Gmail if that suits you.

A technical note. Secure email providers generally can have technical controls (i.e., encryption) to protect the body (content) of the email, and in some cases some small amount of metadata (e.g., Tuta encrypts also the subject). Generally though, you are still trusting the provider to perform that encryption (especially because a mail from Gmail -> Proton/Tuta would be encrypted by Proton/Tuta) and to not use metadata for any purpose besides delivering the emails. So privacy here doesn’t mean absolutely removing the data from a third party, but it means giving it to a third party who uses it (due to contractual obligation, business incentives etc.) only for the intended purpose in a privacy-preserving way.

I suggest you give a read to “Privacy is power” by Carissa Veliz (on the board). She also gave a very good interview on the podcast “firewalls don’t stop dragons”.

I also don’t think “cryptonerds” applies to people like Tim Berners Lee.

FYI i use a degoogled FP3 with microG and I don’t have any problem.

Thanks. Very interesting, I would think that is a nightmare for phishing and similar threats, but maybe they have good monitoring or oversight.

I am actually surprised they got that on the first place. That’s a very major domain name to have…