Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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> The context of the news was a security researcher conducting an audit of the app. If DDG were, as the GP claimed, performing tracking on behalf of MS then it would be more concerning since there is a difference between performing tracking on behalf of a third-party company and merely excluding them from being blocked via a content blocker that most mobile browsers lack anyway.

Sorry, I'm still not entirely sure that I agree that this doesn't count as tracking on behalf of Microsoft. If their browser has an "if MSTracker then allow else doNotAllow", that still seems like it's effectively endorsing MS tracking.

That said, I agree with your criticisms on Kagi (as outlined in sister thread). It would be ideal if Kagi had some means of truly decoupling searches from accounts, but as I stated, at least Kagi charges a fee so they have a means of making money without mining and selling data.

Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone? I would really prefer to use something that allows me to install extensions like uBlock.

> It would be ideal if Kagi had some means of truly decoupling searches from accounts

Important to note is that Kagi does not associate searches with an account to begin with, nor there are any incentives for Kagi to do so (search log would be just a giant liability from a standpoint of Kagi's business model, with no benefit).

I think what you mean is - are there means to make that provable from a technology standpoint? It turns out there are, through something called blind tokens, and we are looking into it. It is being discussed in Kagi forums here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-anonymous-searches...

Another solution available right now in Kagi is paying for the service with Bitcoin/Lightning and using a random email address to sign up (Kagi does not need or verify email addresses, they are just a login id and can be anything).

> I think what you mean is - are there means to make that provable from a technology standpoint?

Yes that is what I meant. I do genuinely believe you when you say that the searches aren't correlated to the accounts, but the problem is that it's difficult to know for sure if that's actually true; how many cases in tech have we thought something was "private" and it turned out that they were vending our data out to the highest bidder?

As long as Kagi doesn't start serving targeted ads, I am personally willing to trust it (as I have for the last year and a half), though I am super interested in the blind token thing you linked.

> Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone?

I use Fennec, which afaict is Android only. It's my understanding it removed various Mozilla analytics though some is said to remain. It's compiled independently from source by F-Droid, which supports reproducible builds.

Primary reasons I use it is for enabling about:config editing out of the box and third party addons (either Mozilla-approved ones like uBlock Origin or any arbitrary addons so long as they're in an addon 'collection', following the same procedure like Firefox Nightly until Mozilla fulfils their goal of easier addon support).

Yeah, doesn't appear to support iOS, at least not in the app store.

Once Alt stores show up in the US I suspect we'll get a lot more of these browsers showing up on iPhone. My last experience with Android was awful so I went crawling back to iOS, but I think that I just got a bad physical unit more than anything else.

I did see that Kagi's Orion browser allows you to install extensions, though I had issues with stability when I tried it a year ago, but a lot can change in a year so I should probably give it again.

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