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Comment by karinakarina | Hacker News Reader

Great list! Always looking for new tools to use. PrivacyTool.io and ThinkPrivacy.ch are great, but it helps to have something else to compare against.

Some quick notes on the actual list: - Should add Startpage - private search engine that gives Google results. - It doesn't explain why products to be avoided, just lists them. A few have explanations, but not all.

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Startpage.com was bought by an adtech company. Of course they say they don't use any data from Startpage.com but ...

Startpage person, here. Startpage doesn't collect user personal data so it wouldn't share it because it doesn't have it.

From Robert Beens (co-founder and CEO): "In no way does System1 want to change the privacy practices or process by Startpage, in fact, they legally cannot as all of those decisions are held by the co-founders of Startpage."

And,

"System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data"

Source - https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...

They are until they aren't. I deem it not trustworthy for the simple reason that I can't be bothered to look out for any changes down the line.

Startpage should have an option to disable sending the large proxy URLs. These make the Startpage SERP very large (relative to other search engines), especially for anyone who does not need them. Plus Startpage limits to 20 results at a time and requires sending a cookie just to change this basic setting. (Why a cookie. This is supposed to be a privacy focused website. Why not accept the settings as parameters in in the URL or request body.) Finally, Startpage is somewhat quick to block an IP if the user is doing a number of searches in succession. Even if it is a viable privacy solution, IMO Startpage has uneccesarily become too slow and cumbersome to compete.

That should be PrivacyTools.io

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