I’ve been using this search engine and I have to say I’m absolutely in love with it.
Search results are great, Google level even. Can’t tell you how happy I am after trying multiple privacy oriented engines and always feeling underwhelmed with them.
Have you tried it? What are your thoughts on it?
From the looks of their own promotional material, the opportunity to build your own tailor-made filter bubble…
That’s not so much a filter bubble as it is noise reduction. No, I don’t want to have Pinterest results in my search engine. No, I don’t have an Instagram or Twitter account and therefore can’t see the content there anyway. I am developer, so I want to raise the relevance of GitHub in my results.
You’re correct. I saw a small red flag and missed the big one. Kagi Corp says it ultimately wants to filter out search results that don’t match:
Kagi has three separate pages that lay out this ideology that promotes data collection and segregation from others first, and privacy last.
I appreciate your rose tinted glasses, but when you wear them, red flags just look like flags.
You skipped political filter bubbles, which can be manipulative indeed. And in their aptly named manifesto, Kagi Corp promises just that:
Isn’t that thoughtful of them? A bubble where you are alone, a bubble they want to build.
You will pay the company,
you will give up your data,
and you will be happy.
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?
If Kagi Corp’s goal is to create a user profile on you, then whether they’re using your data to serve you ads or not is irrelevant.
This is the Privacy community, not the “You will give them your data and be happy” community
In reality I did not read anywhere that they intend to create a profile on you. What I read is some fuzzy idea about a future in which AIs could be customised to the individual level. So far, Kagi’s attitude has been to offer features to do such customisations, rather than doing them on behalf of users, so I don’t see why you are reading that and jumping to the conclusion that they want to build a profile on you, rather than giving you the tools to create that profile. It’s still “data” given to them, but it’s a voluntary action which is much different from data collection in the negative sense we all mean it.
It’s still data given to them, no scare quotes needed. And if that data includes your political alignment, like they say in their manifesto, a data breach would be catastrophic. Far worse has been done with far less. (And even if there isn’t one, using their manifesto to promise a dystopia where you are nestled in a political echo chamber sounds like a nightmare).
And even corporate brand loyalty is mentioned in their manifesto.
When DuckDuckGo complained about Google’s filter bubble, even Google had the good sense to downplay it. Kagi seems giddy about it.
It is if you decide to give it to them. If it’s a voluntary feature and not pure data collection, that’s the difference. Which means if you don’t want to take the risk, you don’t provide that data. I am sure you understand the difference between this and the data collection as a necessary condition to provide the service.
Which means you will simply decide not to use that feature and not give them that data?
It depends, really. When you choose which articles and newspapers you consider reputable, you consider that an echo chamber? I don’t. This is different from using profiling and data collection to provide you, without your knowledge or input, with content that matches your preference. Curating the content that I want to find online is different from Meta pushing only posts that statistically resonate with me based on the behavioral analysis they have done on top of the data collected, all behind the scenes. I don’t see where the dystopia is if I can curate my own content through tools. This is very different from megacorps curating our content for their own profit.
I think there may be a miscommunication here, because I fundamentally also find great distaste with
… Because based on their manifesto, that’s exactly what Kagi wants to do with you as a search engine; show you the things it thinks you want to see.
Every giant corporation has a privacy policy; the same could be said for what Mark Zuckerberg calls the “dumb fucks” who use Facebook.