Verizon Media launches OneSearch, a privacy-focused search engine
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Verizon has a terrible track record on privacy and there's no discussion in this article on where they get their search data from (do they run an index/bot?).
They're going to no doubt shove this down people's throats via bloatware on devices/defaults, but outside of that I cannot see anyone volunteering to use this.
I believe that Verizon Media is being honest (at least from a literal perspective) in their OneSearch Privacy Policy, but I don't think that they're going out of their way to point out any known residual risks. It seems like the winning bidder (for advertisements placed on search result pages) ends up with a very healthy chunk of identifying information, and also what search terms you are currently using. Am I missing something with this one?
PS (and DDG too): The OneSearch Privacy Policy details some of the privacy implications in selecting an advertisement which matches your search results, but once an advertisement has been selected, it falls silent on any privacy concerns with actually delivering and displaying that advertisement to you. I think that's where they've got some exposure with browser-based access. Worth noting, this same issue might also be in play on DuckDuckGo. (I haven't looked into it.) If someone has publicly examined aspect of DDG in any depth, I'd appreciate a link to the article. If not, this seems like a very worthwhile security issue for someone to follow-up on.
Disclosure: These are my personal thoughts and they do not reflect an indirect commercial relationship that I have with OneSearch. I have no "insider" or unpublished information that is significant to this topic. Like most people, I too was unaware that OneSearch even existed before reading the article.
I'll guess it's a similar deal to duckduckgo where much of the crawling is outsourced to bing.