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Kagi Blog - Education Shouldn't Be Held for Ransom (blog.kagi.com)
submitted 1 day ago by excursion22@piefed.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53993576

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[-] Forsho@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 day ago

Yeah that is an AD for a corporate with an overpriced services.

I find it sad that privacy which is a fucking human right is being commercialized, packaged and resold as an overpriced commodity by corporations like kagi, proton or whatever coming next in line.

In reality this makes “privacy” a product only rich westerners of the world can afford, while other poor global south humans can fuck off

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 6 points 1 day ago

Huh? How exactly do you package privacy? It’s something you can lose, but not something you can buy.

Kagi is selling search, same as Google. The difference is that you can only pay in dollars, not data.

I agree it’s overpriced, but this is where we are. The actual market for genuine web services is atrophied after 30 years of neckbeards naively insisting that web services should be free. Search should cost $5/year by now. But oh well, 30 years too late is better than never.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

30 years of neckbeards naively insisting that web services should be free.

Why. You were off to a great start.

I'm one of those neckbeards and web services should be free, as in a social service. So should potable drinking water.

Paying for a social service with money voluntarily or with your own data is not a really a choice between providers, it's an admission that we should, in fact, all remain essentially cattle.

[-] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago

Hang on, if a social service doesn’t get paid for how does it exist?

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 points 1 day ago

I too was one of those neckbeards, so I use the term with love. :)

I certainly think we should voluntarily create some crowd-funded free-to-use services like the fediverse. But we can’t pretend that commerce doesn’t exist.

People are going to try to make money by hosting stuff online and enticing people to go there and use it. I would prefer if those people made money by charging admission instead of by collecting and selling data.

[-] Forsho@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago

I am talking about privacy, i was not talking about search engine (indexing websites text and pulling results).

You are missing the point completely here, privacy should not be a debatable subject, laws should been in place to fully protect humans from data markets, governments should never allowed this situation (where google sells your information) to exist.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 6 points 1 day ago

I agree with your policy position. The three options should be:

  1. Crowd-funded, free to use, privacy preserving
  2. Paid, privacy preserving
  3. Self-hosted

A fourth “free to use, subsidized through data collection” option shouldn’t even be legal.

But we’re not there yet. And in order to get there, we need companies like Kagi to populate the second category so that when politicians say “but how will they make money if they can’t sell data?” we have examples to point to.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Crowd-funded, free to use, privacy preserving Paid, privacy preserving Self-hosted

quit it w that tankie shit! lol

(in case it's not clear: i'm agreeing with you)

[-] alien_observer@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

I've been using Kagi off and on for about 6 months and overall I've enjoyed the experience. That being said, while they have a way to browse anonymously/privately, it's hard to take their word for it when you have to sign in to use their product. I'll probably continue to use it, but if I really need some privacy, I'm just going to fire up that onion and wade through DDG results, which are still alright.

[-] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 23 hours ago

You seem to be misinformed. Kagi's privacy pass cryptographically proves that you're allowed to search, without having anything link back to your account. It doesn't get more anonymous than that.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 points 21 hours ago

No, what they said is technically accurate.

The whole point of their architecture is that they don’t have to look up your account — but that does nothing to guarantee that they don’t decide to look up your account.

Since you have to auth in order to generate the anonymized tokens, Kagi could (in principle) track which account generated the tokens and query that relationship when you go to use a token.

Ultimately, if you’re not fabricating your own silicon and hand-writing your own assemblers and compilers, you gotta trust someone, so it’s good enough for my risk profile, but I can understand if that’s not good enough for some people.

[-] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 16 hours ago

That is factually incorrect.

Help page from Kagi (I'd understand if you don't trust it), fit for non-techie consumption. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/how-does-privacy-pass-work.html

So here's the RFC, which defined the protocol in the first place (Kagi didn't invent it, just implements it) https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9576/

As such they have absolutely no way of 'deciding' to look up a searchers account based on the token used.

That ofcourse does not reduce other ways anyone can track you like fingerprinting.

[-] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

FYI they have a limited free version now where you can get more usage out of it by clearing cookies, but it might behave differently on different IP addresses

[-] ComradeMiao@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I cannot imagine paying for search. Why am I seeing this ad?

[-] CagedDingo@aussie.zone 9 points 1 day ago

You are always paying for search. This is just directly and transparent.

[-] Forsho@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago

Because kagi team is active on lemmy, same for proton and mullvad even apple employees were here reading and analyzing information from tech committees.

I hate the internet

[-] cygnus_sillius@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

If you use search many times a day, like for work, then it's a much more pleasant and efficient experience. Search results are customizeable, you have a personal blocklist, AI slop farms filtered out, etc. But yeah it's a hard sell for the casual user.

[-] _fryerDan@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

It really has changed my work. And being able to raise/lower sites in your personalized results is chefs kisses

[-] TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 day ago

Kagi: "Education shouldn't be held for ransom. So we charge you to search literally the same info you get for no cost on DDG."

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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