I'm kind of disappointed in ecosia for implementing a new feature that would send user data to Microsoft and Google. I liked it not only for it's environmental mission but also because it had decent privacy.
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Yeah wanted to use them before, but it's a solid no go. Can't see this search engine living for long…
Ecosia always sent user data to Microsoft (Bing), it's just that they will also be pulling search results from Google now so now they're contractually bound to send some data to Google as well.
The point is that it never was for extremely privacy minded folks, it's ofcourse a better choice than using Google or Bing directly because you're atleast not getting profiled as far as I can tell, but it can only do so much when it is dependent on ad revenue and has to work with Bing and Google for search results.
I'm not a privacy expert and this is just my opinion as a fellow Ecosia user, so take this with a grain of salt.
Yeah, but if you read their old privacy policy and their new one, you can clearly see that their new policy is basically saying "We care about your privacy, but Bing and Google don't. So blame them." Obviously, I am vulgarizing, but this is how it feels.
Well, that's essentially what it boils down to. Now it's up to users to decide based on their respective threat models whether they wanna use Ecosia or not.
According to this personnwho analyzed it, it already was sucks before: https://infosec.exchange/@voxel/111002040974943461
Just started using their search engine about 2 months ago, as soon as I heard the news I just dropped it.
I like the idea but if I want to send data to bing I'd use bing tbh.
