And before anyone says it, I know I can use tor and VPNs and every other privacy tool out there to become more anonymous, but that makes doing normal www things more difficult than it needs to be.
/s
There's a simpler argument to use instead of trying to bend over backwards justifying this thing you really want to do but deep down know that it's bad for you. In fact, it's already become mainstream lingo. It's called You Only Live Once!
Those are the only four words you have to utter and everyone who was about to start arguing with you will back way instantly and you'll save yourself these strained self-serving justifications. The beauty is there is no counter argument to such pristine nihilistic capitulation.
Once Kagi, a startup, breaks the precedent with this credit card requirement crap and actually starts getting significant marketshare everyone else will say, "these guys just normalized requiring a credit card upfront for this type of service. That's great, we can now open another front in the enshittification of the internet and tie highly revealing information to real people more directly." And yes, some of these people will undoubtedly be less savory types and of more questionable moral character than the Kagi crew. And I dare say in all likelihood, so will the late stage Kagi crew as well.
On the other hand, if you do a little good faith research you'll find some email and vpn providers do allow you to send cash (gasp) via postal service to activate your account. It doesn't matter if only one customer uses that option. It is the existence of that option that creates trust.
Unless there is such an option or something nearly identical in ease and function, all these aspirational cross-my-heart-hope-to-die assurances are just ridiculous.
""" Just to acknowledge that Kagi already implements with OpenNode to accept crypto payments so this is specifically about Monero.
> I understand the technical issues with implementing Monero, but given the number of users that will be attracted to Kagi specifically because if its privacy, it seems quite inconsistent to only offer non-anonymised payment formats.
We heard the same argument before implementing crypto, and the reality is it attracted very small number of users (less than 0.3% Kagi users pay with crypto). Since this was extremely hard to implement, and there are already ways to convert Monero to Bitcoin so there is path to payment, and based on our previous experience we expect the impact of implementing Monero directly to be minimal, we have decided to focus our very limited resources elsewhere (eg. make search better). Thanks for understanding. """
[1] https://opennode.com/contact/
[2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...
[3] https://kagifeedback.org/d/493-enable-anonymous-payments-ala...
Bitcoin is not anonymous at all, a public ledger is the opposite of anonymous if anything. At best it's pseudonymous.
I think parent used Mullvad as an example as they actually support creation of accounts 100% anonymously, as you can literally mail them an envelope with cash.
Well, acktshually…
BTC can be anonymous through careful wallet management combined with methods such as CoinJoins[1].
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/searchengines/comments/m0i869/comme...
> There is no more incentive to collect, misuse, or otherwise do anything with user data. In fact, for Kagi, user data is a liability. We don’t want it. We have nothing useful to do with it. You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account. But other than that, there is really no incentive for Kagi to ever want to touch your data.
https://blog.1password.com/real-cost-search-engines-intervie...
Instead of being scared to share information with [your search engine], you will chose what data you want it to have and volunteer your data only after knowing its incentives align with yours... The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so!
>You have to log in for Kagi and create an account because that’s the nature of a subscription-based business model; you somehow have to tie the payment to an account.
If data was really viewed as a liability, they would adopt a data minimization model similar to Mullvad and not tie user accounts and email addresses together at all.
Then normies can login with email and everyone is happy!
If they really didn't want it, there are options.
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.
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.
It certainly can be when it is tied to other data. For example, your entire search history.
In short, the extension receives blindly signed ‘passes’ for each authentication and these passes can be used to bypass future challenge solutions using an anonymous redemption procedure. For example, Privacy Pass is supported by Cloudflare to enable users to redeem passes instead of having to solve CAPTCHAs to visit Cloudflare-protected websites.
The only thing we can do is vote with our wallet if we see that they have lied all the way.
This will only lead us to Russel's teapot [0].
BTW, their current privacy policy is at [1].
and i doubt mean a non biding privacy policy. heck metabook and google both always had one saying the same thing
And you cannot really confirm the above use case very well. What if it is so sophisticated that it knows when it is being monitored, or it is so random or well hidden, that it might take years to spot.
We are just doomed.
Is there an enforceable claim that Kagi will never store such info?
The making an account for searching linked to govt-verifiable payment and ID data, however ephemerally, is also a high bar for me (and for women in the US with the incoming administration's focus on over-regulating pregnancy outcomes, holy fork NO)
If the government really wanted to, they can just get SSL private keys from CAs and decrypt all the traffic no matter who you search with, anyway. It's probably only a matter of time...