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Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

Posting for the unaware, without commentary on the content - just an FYI because it's something that matters to me, at least:

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

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I also want to add that Kagi recently partnered with a Russian state-owned search engine Yandex: https://kagi.com/changelog#5340. This means they are paying money to the Russian state through taxes and sharing my search queries with it. This was a critical issue for me, and it led me to stop using it and request a refund earlier this year.

Sad to hear that. I seriously considered registering, but knowing this I can't in good faith pay money to Kagi. I know it sounds petty, but to people in my country this issue is very important.

And for many businesses in the EU it's illegal to transfer money directly or indirectly to Russia. I don't know how this applies exactly, but I know my company cannot legally pay for this

This is a critical issue to pretty much every EU citizen.

And according to the link below, the Kagi founder/CEO claims Yandex is a private company headquartered in Kazakhstan, unrelated to the Russian government.

https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311987220115248

Yes and (for posterity / those lazy to read the linked Mastodon thread), if you read through the linked thread, you see that is nonsense and Yandex is very much a Russian business continually adjusting results based on Russian government input (to cross-check, see Wikipedia on Yandex).

Exactly, glad I'm not the only one!

This makes Vlad look much better than the poster thinks. It's ridiculous that the poster is dishing out, but when Vlad offers discussion (not even criticism!) they are like "oh no, I'm just a little nobody getting HARASSED by a powerful and might CEO". They can't take even the mildest disagreement, let alone criticism.

People need to stop posting this blog post as if it's something incriminating, or even negative. I'm sure if GDPR is violated, Kagi will sort it out with their lawyers, but as of now I don't see what exactly are we worrying about. For me it's neither GDPR nor Vlad's "appalling" behaviour and if it's neither, this whole blog is utterly useless

Well, re: GDPR, for one Vlad is abjectly clearly wrong on email addresses not being PII. They are.

The mere fact of him relying on his rationalisation (of burner email addresses) over established GDPR definitions of PII is troubling. To me it rings immature and unprofessional. As a software engineer I shall treat PII with care and account for it. If a CEO is this defensive about their clearly wrong opinion, it's a red flag to me.

I was also worried about their naïve "trust the market incentives bro" stance about privacy, but they actually did implement Privacy Pass eventually, and I'm now a happy user. What I like about Kagi is that they are a real company (not a corporation) that actually might listen to the demands of their users, and have a real presence on HN, Reddit and Discord, so the bad stuff can change over time

I read through the whole opinion piece.

Which part matters to you? Because it's not obvious.

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