sudneo

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

And I am saying that there are tools to increase this trust.

I also want to stress that you have no tools really to verify. Open source code is useless, audits are also partially useless. I have done audits myself (as the tech contact for the audited party) and the reality is that they are extremely easy to game and anyway are just point in time snapshots. There is nothing that impedes the company tomorrow to deploy a change that invalidates what was audited. The biggest tools we have are legal protection (I mean, most companies that collect all kind of data disclose that they do nowadays) and economic incentive. Kagi seems to provide good reason to trust them from both these angles.

Obviously, if that's not enough for you, fair enough, but if you are considering a company to be intentionally malicious or deceptive, then even the guarantees you suggest do not guarantee anything, so at this point I really wonder if or how you trust anybody, starting from your ISP, your DNS provider, your browser etc.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

https://kagi.com/privacy

Kagi only stores the information about the client that you explicitly provide by using your account, as laid out in our interface. This includes:

Your email to facilitate account access and support contact (ex: password reset)
Your account settings (ex: theme, search region, selected language)

And nothing else.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

They had a security audit, they have a canary on their website, they have a privacy policy which is legally binding, and they have a business incentive.

If you so much suspect that they do collect searches and associate them with accounts (something which they claim they don't do), you can make a report to the relevant data protection authority, which then can audit them.

As someone else also commented, you can use an alias email and pay in crypto if you really wish to not associate your account with your searches. Just be advised that between IP addresses and browser fingerprinting it might always be possible to associate your searches together (even if not to you as an individual with name and surname), and this is something that big CDNs like cloudflare or imperva also provide for you. So you still rely in most cases on what the company says and what their business model is to determine whether you trust them or not.

So far kagi has both a good policy (great policy actually) and a business model that doesn't suggest any interest for them to illegally collect data to sell them.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

The privacy policy is also a legally binding document, not just a promise that the company does. If they are found violating it, the GDPR fines are going to hurt and they would lose the customer base in a blink. Their privacy policy right now is exemplary, I am one of those who read policies before using a product and kagi's is literally the best I have seen: clear, detailed, specific and most importantly, good from the privacy perspective.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

You forget the part where they mentioned a different business model that allows to dump the ad-driven one, aligning the interest of the user and the vendor. In other words, a model in which the company gets the money from the user so that it can build a product for them, rather than getting money from others (advertisers, etc.) so that the user is someone who simply has to be milked for data or sold shit. This frame, in my opinion, changes quite significantly the otherwise dystopian nature of such (future) vision. The objectives in fact are very important in this discussion. Facebook, twitter etc. need people to spend time on their platform to give value to their customers (the advertisers). Creating bubbles, fomenting incendiary content, etc. are all functional to that objective. If the business model was different, the same might not happen.

In any case, the current features that exist (and that are not the speculations on the future in the manifesto) allow the users to customize the rankings as they want, without AI or kagi doing it for us. If I don't want to see fox news when I search for something, I make the conscious choice and downrank it. If I want to see guardian and apnews, I uprank them. The current features empower users to curate their own results, which is very different from an opaque, black-box product doing it for us for specific reasons like might be the case of Facebook.

Ultimately, someone will make a decision about how to rank results in a page. Some algorithm needs to be used. What's a better alternative, compared to me providing strong inputs to such algorithm, that does not raise red flags?

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

There is a point that I am clearly failing to make.

All the disagreement about the brave stuff, about the topic that generated discussion is there. You can check for yourself in discord or on the forum. I also want to note that the forum post has been closed temporarily and reopened several times. It's not completely unreasonable to close a topic when the discussions are going completely off the rails, which in this case was happening (both critics and supporters did that).

That said, there is nothing that evidently shows the intention to stifle disagreement, including the request to move the discussion elsewhere (discord has tons of critical content even now). However, the user who started the thread wanted to discuss something else, which is not related to the discussion at hand, but related to how they moderated the discussion (claiming something we have no idea about. Were their comments really deleted? What was their content? Were they maybe violating some rule? Who knows what they wrote, maybe the insulted other users directly). We have no proof whatsoever that they censored comments from queer folks specifically (which is the whole argument of the thread, both mastodon one and the screenshot attached), there is only that user claiming they did because their comments were allegedly deleted (maybe it's true, but again, who knows why). Considering that there is plenty of criticism still present in both discord and the forum, I don't see how I need to suspend the judgment to call that claim bullshit, because I can objectively see that criticism was not censored. In addition to that, I can also make a judgment based on character. That user used completely bullshit claims to fabricate accusations, in that very same context. The whole point of that threat was a smear campaign against that guy, and they didn't bother at all to repeat what they posted, for example, or make a proper argument. They just claimed something with a screenshot that doesn't give any information and other supporting arguments that are even more ridiculous (the country site and the "interpretation" of a sentence that I quoted above).

I am not even sure why there is the need to discuss anything coming from that person. If that was a conservative/trump supporter making some claim with analogue arguments, they would be laughed out of Mastodon (rightfully). And that is the only source about the attitude towards LGBTQ+ folks. Don't you think that before making such a broad statement, we should have at least some consistent pattern? A bunch of examples that show the attitude or something like that?

And no, it's not "two users" because, as I said before, from what I understand the other user referred to the thread in the screenshot, not to the "critical comments" deleted before, which we have no idea about.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

Yeah, that thread linked (https://lemm.ee/comment/8016834) references the same Mastodon thread. I know because I followed all of this few months back.

I do think it is super important to discuss whether a tech bro is just making a quick cash grab product in order to get bought out by a larger corporation, though. As seen with the Skiff tech bros.

Oh yeah, this is definitely interesting, but...while email is somewhat binding as a service, a search engine is not. Give me 2 minutes and I have changed the default search engine on all my devices away from Kagi. If that will be the case (despite the fact that so far, I have no reason to think it is the case), it will be super easy to move away. I think if I were a Skiff customer without a custom domain, I would still be crying instead.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

The second person (I think) referred to the thread in the screenshot when they said "I saw it disappearing live". I have no problems believing that the guy deleted that thread, it's an off-topic thread. What I have problem to believe is that the guy specifically deleted comments from queer folks (which is the point of this post). And again, the person who started the Mastodon thread is someone that - in my view - has no credibility at all, considering the completely dishonest way in which they carried out the conversation.

Not sure what the screenshot you posted is supposed to prove. He closed a thread on the kagifeedback site asking to move the discussion (if needed) in Kagi Discord, where - in fact - happened (although with very little benefit for anybody). AFAIK it's not "his personal Discord" server, it's Kagi's server, and I believe most of the conversation (including the one in the "incriminating" screenshot) happened in #general.
I am really not sure what your point is.

Either way, it doesn't matter what I believe. What I know is that the person making the Mastodon thread is someone in bad faith and with (in my opinion) completely bad takes. Someone who makes such a post, in my opinion is a moron.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

The screenshot shows an off-topic comment that complains about other comments being "left up", and the CEO that answers that nothing has been deleted, in fact (I suppose in regards to the topic). The thread in the screenshot was (going to be) deleted because it's off-topic, it's a meta-conversation that doesn't add anything to the general discussion, if not noise and chaos (and tbh, following long conversation in discord is already terrible as it is).

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

We are talking about the same thread, right?

https://nyan.lol/@zicklepop/111716010186646210

This one.

There is no comment that the "CEO tried to scrub". There is only a discord screenshot of a meta-conversation about the fact that the user claimed their comment was deleted, and the CEO answers that nothing was deleted to avoid this very same accusation, and then says he will delete this (the meta) thread (because it's off-topic).

Not sure what you find funny though, however,

a paraphrased and reinterpreted (in bad faith) piece of a comment

referred to:

and his response is basically that inclusivity is why there is no innovation in tech anymore. i think he wants to get acquired by 37signals.

Which is completely arbitrary. Even wanting to read the comment of the CEO with malice, he said "politics".

…appeal to ethnicity is pretty funny

This has nothing to do with ethnicity, it has to do with words and meaning. Calling someone a fascist for such matter is completely bananas and - frankly - disrespectful towards the people who died fighting the actual fascism. The CEO can be an idiot, or a tech bro, but he expressed his views and let others express theirs. This is pretty evident from their forum.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Privacy in Thoughts on Kagi?

I know what you are referring to with regards to the LGBTQ+ matter, but the only source is the user who reported it (with a screenshot that did not show anything), the same user who used some completely dishonest and bad faith arguments* to slander the CEO guy. I wouldn't take that at face value and I have absolutely no problem to see, instead, a reason to moderate their comments.

* the CEO of kagi has a website with a "best country ranking", which is just a stupid page with 15 criterias chosen to rank which country is the greatest. The argument was that the guy must be a racist/white suprematist because the top countries for the most part were white (and wealthy. Duh). Apparently they were especially pissed about the fact that he decided to include the Olympic medals pro capite, despite the fact that it's one of the few metrics in which first world countries were not at the top.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Technology in The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years

Our starting point for design is longevity, which means making our devices more repairable, a very different approach to the electronics industry standard. To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack. In the end, it comes down to how we make a product that lasts for at least five years. We needed to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, and the headphone jack is subject to dust and water ingress over time.

Again, you might disagree, you might know better, I don't know. But this is their motivation when it comes to longevity and hence sustainability. To me, it seems a reasonable idea: if the jack helps reducing the consumption of batteries in headphones but decreases the lifespan of the phones, it seems a bad tradeoff.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Technology in The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years

They have literally an explanation for this on their website. You might disagree, but saying "it makes no sense"...makes no sense.

Also, they discontinued the earbuds and still no jack on FP5, so the idea that "they wanted to sell their own buds" doesn't seem to be likely.

sudneo , 4 months ago to Selfhosted in Autostart Jellyfin flatpak

Just a small note: docker can also run rootless for a while. The configuration is slightly convoluted, but can be done.

sudneo , 5 months ago to Technology in Kagi search engine releases a "lens" to search lemmy/kbin instances

Yes, it is a metasearch engine. It's basically like proxy+aggregator or multiple engines.