this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
366 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
76839 readers
1577 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't have a problem paying for a good service. I do have a problem having all my searches, video or article views linked to an account (with my payment data i.e. real name no less).
Then I have great news for you! Kagi accept bitcoin, does not validate email addresses (so you can register as
fhhdsbgwg@hrjesbgwgw.comif that appeals to you), and they implemented privacy pass tokens that fully anonymize your searches. They also allows searching through tor!You still need to log in and link all your searches to each other. Those are trivial to de-anonymize you from.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Obviously you lose some of the customization, but otherwise still a great service.
Ok that sounds like an actual technical solution that - to be honest - I wasn't expecting here. Sadly, there's way too many processes involved for me to consider this for myself. Also, I am not transferring a single penny to the divided states of southern northern america until I run out of options - but that's just me.
Just use their third party crypto payment service. It doesnt transmit any of this. Perhaps look this kind of thing up prior to insinuating these things are required for Kagi.
You still link all your searches together which deanonymizes you within a couole of days.
They have a no-log, no-profile policy, which is why I use them.
I don't trust companies to not log my data. Not ever.
That's fair -- it necessarily extends trust, and at the least you'd want them to be liable for false advertising.
I did go digging directly as a result of your comment, and I did find that it looks like Kagi operates at least in part, if not in whole, from Serbia. They have a San Francisco mailing address...but it's just basically a mailbox.
For me, at least, that's a concern; I've posted here on the matter to make others aware. I don't know if it'd be enough to stop me from using them, but it certainly does make me reconsider how much weight I'd be willing to place on statements the company makes about its privacy policy, and what their practical legal liability is if they're making inaccurate statements about their privacy practices.
Good additional information - I don't necessarily have a problem with a company being based in Europe (better than the divided states) but our governments here are also slowly diving into totalitarianism, and Serbia has never really become a proper democracy since the last Yugoslavian wars. Currently that country is way too cozy with Putin for my taste.
After the killing of all the warrant canaries in the US, Serbian headquarters seems like a pro rather than a con.
What that means to someone is up to them. Some users on here do not like the US at all, for example, and they might be delighted to be using a Serbian company instead of a US company. That's not my position, but I've no doubt that it's a perspective for some. I have mentioned Kagi in the past favorably, and simply want people to understand, as best as I can, what using Kagi entails.
EDIT: For users who might be in the US, though, and not familiar with the political structure in Europe today, while Serbia is in Europe, it is not
presently
in the EU, and isn't subject to the kind of data privacy laws or legal/judicial regimen that one might expect of companies in the EU.