2 replies to this topic

[butler]

Just thought I'd post this search engine I found after discovering there were serious security flaws in DuckDuckGo (Partly due to it being hosted in America, and meaning they come under all those fantastic anti-privacy laws directly, as well as there terms and conditions being liberally worded to dance around the fact they may end up logging your searches if the government asks them ). ixquick gives you the results in a similiar format to Google results, but collects them by anonymously sending queries to google, yahoo, etc. collects the results, and recommends them by their default results by them by showing you a star if the website appears in their first ten results. It's also managed to pass some sort of european security test.

here's the link for ixquick
https://ixquick.com/
For their other similiar engine, StartPage
https://www.startpage.com/
Sign up for the interesting StartMail Project.
https://beta.startmail.com/

As you can guess, i'm pretty sold by this one, and haven't come across any bad reviews about it (yet). Just have to remember that nothings 100% secure anyway

[themuntdregger]

Thx Butler. I found the link pretty useful.

My day job is pretty uninteresting, save for the fact that it does involve me in matters of both privacy (and anti-privacy) law and regulation. Regardless of the fact that i'm a tediously boring and pointless old fart who's about as much threat to national security as a dog turd on the steps of '10 Downing Street', I think it pays to consider who is using your data and why. Although i'm fairly convinced hmrc's  intentions are essentially honourable, they seem  about as ineffectual as they are ridiculous. I worry far more about the corporate power of Microsoft, Apple and Google (and Tesco ftw) plus the capabilities of states such as Russia  and China.

Knowing your interest in social and economic history, i'd be interested to get a perspective on the latter.

[butler]

the dog turd could cause the PM to slip, depending on how he fell it could have serious implications.

Personally I'm more worried about companies with monopolies over all else (primary Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.), because they just funnel everybodies info to only a selection of databases (since most of them make the bulk of their profit from selling advertisements based of profiling you). The whole government spying on it's on people and other people (afaik the US program of collecting information on foreign citizens in this style seems to be breaking most of it's allies national espionage laws), disturbs be mostly because of the countries claiming the greatest "democratic" and "liberal" governments in the world then collect all the information they can on you that if they were collected in similar ways on physical equivalents, would be unlawfully, and probably have a lot of government workers laid off, sacked and persecuted because they are invading peoples privacy - remember the phone hacking scandals?

eh but it's all a matter of paranoia built into governments after 9/11, should be interesting when a virtual police state is built.

Anyway, on those search engines, Startpage is one that uses google solely, while ixquick uses ones such as yahoo & gig , but i find that ixquick is more reliable to search with in terms of working (but so far I've only been using them under terribly slow connection, a government proxy & firewall, or both ) with both basically yielding equivalently useful results, i find. The free proxy's pretty nice too, as are the non cookie custom search URLs. Just best to read over the entire privacy page & privacy policies of both.