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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

Now people create accounts to get their searches directly tied to their profile

Like that new search engine that's better than googly?

You mean Kagi? They’re pretty transparent about how they approach query data, and it’s as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen.

https://kagi.com/privacy

> Kagi [...] [is] as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen

For now

No, I wasn't referring to Kagi (which is done by a hard-working guy btw), just in general to the trend that the internet is now completely different if seen from a perspective of 2006.

Storage was expensive, and data wasn't seen as a goldmine as now, so most long-term logs went to /dev/null.

That the normality now is to ask users to create an account, have data-scientists (whose goal is precisely to find needles in haystacks), etc.

Kagi makes it very clear in their privacy policy and in their settings that search queries are not saved. If they save them regardless, that's a clear cut violation of the law.

From their settings page:

  > Save My Search History
  > Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any
  > searches by default. In the future we may add features that will
  > utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.

It sure seems like it will always be opt-in, even if they add query saving in the future.

A violation... of which law?

The FTC enforces (or at least claims to) against companies with misleading privacy policies.

On tons of search engines and AI services, you are nudged or required to have an account (which forces you to de-anonymize yourself and/or link your activity to a specific account).

20 years ago, when this leak happened, the situation wasn't like that.

Gmail was barely born, so Google accounts didn't make sense.

The article was like "wow we managed to deanonymize a search query", but that's actually the norm now.

Essentially, this scandalous AOL-leak, became a legitimized every-day routine (sadly).

Today when you type anything inside a ChatGPT-like AI app (this is the case also for many search engines), you get tons of contractors, workers and partners who have access to such dataset:

researchers, engineers, support, advertising platforms, technical intermediaries, legal, etc.

Though the future isn't gloomy; in the short-term, with the advent of LLMs, we may actually see a really good solution private-wise: fully local answers.

Which means that for the first time, queries and questions may not leave the device or sent to whoever you need to trust.

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