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Comment by okmokmz | Hacker News Reader

I'm a strong advocate for digital privacy and opposed to the majority of data collection that occurs, but this comment is FUD. None of the info that you listed would be private if you used Bing normally, so if you're worried about them having that info you'd need to stop using search engines all together

>So when a search is done, our IP address is send to Bing.

Explain why you believe that's a negative? If you use Bing normally they would know your IP as well

>user agent string

Again, using bing normally will allow them to see this information

>search term

Obviously required to be sent to bing

>some settings like your country and language setting

Again, this is information that would be available to Bing if you use their service normally

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>Explain why you believe that's a negative? If you use Bing normally they would know your IP as well

I'm a bit uncomfortable in letting MicroSoft associate my IP with what I search daily. I use GitHub and Linkedin and most of the time I'm logged in to at least one of those services. Now I don't know for sure if Bing associates these searches to my account based on the IP(someone can shed some light on this?). StartPage and DuckDuckGo both use third party searches but they don't share user IP(https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...)

For other details like search term, country etc... I absolutely understand that they are needed to be send. I just quoted them as a sentence.

If it wasn't for the IP sharing, I would be a happy ecosia user :)

I definitely understand the desire to not have one's IP tied to their search history/browsing in some cases, but as this service makes no mention of being an anonymous or private search engine I don't think your critique is an actual issue with the service. Your use case simply doesn't match the purpose of this search engine

You're right, privacy is not their selling point. But they do have many phrases like "We don’t store your searches permanently" and "We don’t sell your data to advertisers" in their website, which are technically true but I misunderstood that they don't store my IP either because of those. I came across the text I quoted in the parent comment months later when I came across a thread in r/privacy and I passed it on. StartPage and DuckDuckGo still makes money from ads and doesn't share user IP. It would have been great if Ecosia functioned similarly, and in that case many people like me who are concerned about sharing IP with Bing(or other services) can join Ecosia for search.

DuckDuckGo also uses Bing and they don't send the IP AFAIK

AFAIK that is impossible

StartPage does it with Google and is explained here: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

So it is probably possible.

Definitely not impossible. Microsoft offers a pay-as-you-go Bing Search API (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...).

I can only assume ecosia share this data with Microsoft because doing so has allowed them to land a more lucrative deal.

I would assume they send the IP so that Bing will return location specific search results for weather, local businesses and such. I see no reason to assume malicious intent.

What’s stopping them from performing an offline IP location lookup and requesting location specific search results without sharing the IP with Microsoft?

I'm not sure if that is a feature that the Bing API supports. I couldn't find anything about looking up coordinates in the docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi....

Yeah their documentation is dreadful, but they could just append loc:countryCode to the query before making the API request: e.g. ‘attractions loc:dk’.. at least that works for me despite some people mentioning this filter is no longer supported.

Not sure how DDG and other search engines that rely on Bing does it, but it’s certainly possible without sharing the users’ IP with Microsoft.

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