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Comment by Cider9986 | Hacker News Reader

I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).

Paying should get you more privacy not less.

I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.

Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.

>Support private, independent search

>See search results ad-free

>Get a cleaner view on all results pages

>Cancel any time

Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.

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Depends on how private you want to be, but you can pay Kagi with Bitcoin[1] and use that to buy privacy pass tokens and access it through Tor.[2] It’s not complete privacy, but it decouples the account from the searches.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html

Yeah they should use privacy pass for the default accounts as well to decouple payment from account.

Absolutely not. I don't feel it's necessary to pay the sacrifices needed for a trustless society.

I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).

>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).

This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.

I don't really understand your first paragraph.

Privacy Pass would decouple each search from the account. I think it’s okay to have as an opt-in thing. But private payments should be the default IMO.

I see. I mispoke with "privacy pass" although it's similar. I meant like a one time break between your payment and account for regular accounts underneath the option to use privacy pass.

Like posteo does it or Brave does it for Origin:

https://posteo.de/en/site/payment

I think we’re broadly in agreement: the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better.

It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).

Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)

While they don't offer anonymous/private payments, you can use PrivacyPass no matter how you pay for Kagi. So, yes, the fact that you have an account will be known to anyone with access to their subscriber data, but what you search for will not be tied to that identity.

And in addition, they just ask the minimal info to be able to use the service, an email address, and not a full usual registration.

Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:

>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.

https://brave.com/origin/

I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.

Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.

I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.

The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).

There was this https://blog.torproject.org/funding-internet-freedom-togethe...

That's a good idea and it could give you a checklist to select the projects you want to support.

Signal, Tor, and GrapheneOS(through github) have monthly recurring option so you can just set that up once.

Do you imply that you never order anything online?

My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.

Do you use Google instead?

Brave.

Fair enough! How has it been for you?

It's actually a very similar UI to Google at least, in a good way if Google was ever good.

The results are quite good except images I like the results more then DDG or Startpage.

Google’s still king vs. DDG (Bing-ish), Startpage, & Kagi. By a longshot. How’s Brave Images?

Terrible image results. I prefer Brave's website results to Google though.

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