Privacy

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Is Qwant still good privacy wise? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 day ago by fievel@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I use Qwant as my default search engine because I thought it was more respectful of my privacy than Google or Bing and DuckDuckGo is not giving so good results in my country (for localization related searches).

I noticed that the engine was removed from the default engines for URL bar in latest IronFox version. So I searched a bit about why so, and found this issue in their tracker : https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/47.

What to think about this ? The message from ironfox dev seems clear but qwant seems to claim that the shared data are anonymized.

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[–] sanpo@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The issue seems a bit misrepresented by the dev.

The mentioned section of the privacy policy is true only for the logged in users that have agreed to voluntarily share their data.

Without logging in they don't even store a single cookie on my device.

[–] celenity@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The issue seems a bit misrepresented by the dev.

I don't believe I misrepresented it. Others (such as Privacy Guides) also don't recommend Qwant for similar reasons.

It doesn't matter whether this type of data collection is only for logged in users/optional/etc. Selling data and profiling users in any way, shape, or form is unacceptable. We're trying to reserve our default search engines for the best of the best, and it's clear that Qwant doesn't align with the values of the IronFox project by engaging in this behavior, so it can't make that cut. Users are of course always welcome to manually add Qwant if they trust it or wish to use it.

Also, I just tested creating a Qwant account, and I received the following prompt:

Welcome to Qwant ! In order to offer more diverse advertising and better align with your browsing, Qwant and its partners use limited data to improve your user experience, ensure the proper functioning of our site, and analyze how we can enhance our features. You can modify your cookie preferences at any time via our cookie manager by clicking on our Privacy policy. If you wish to maintain browsing without any processing and/or sharing of your personal data with our partners Qwant recommends that you click on "Refuse all".

This is extremely vague, doesn't mention that the partner is Microsoft, that this data is used for tracking and profiling users, etc. - it reads to me like something I'd see on the CMP of Google or YouTube... I don't think it's fair to say that users are voluntarily sharing their data or consenting to this.

[–] fievel@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is fair, as long as you still allow to add own search engine it's good enough (I re-added qwant but I'm testing out alternatives a bit (searxng (public instance first), startpage and re-give a go to ddg to see if it improved a bit for local results)

[–] fievel@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago

This is how I interpreted the policy too but wanted to be sure about it. It's so easy to get lost in juridic language.