In terms of privacy, this is how the Searxes (meta of meta searches) compares to DDG, Startpage, and Mojeek:

Superficially Metager is privacy respecting and there's even an .onion host for it. So I'll have to add it to the table in the future.

For the moment, I'll say that Metager shares the following with advertisers:

• first 2 blocks of your IP address
• user-agent string
• your search query They say it's for non-personalised advertizing.

matrix for life

The title is copied from the article, it's a little misleading, since the users are given the option of choosing from multiple search engines including DDG, Google and others

(a little late, but a nice addition)

microsoft bad, gnu good

can't wait :)

mobile devices liberated at last

really creepy and scary stuff

This was originally posted on Reddit /r/privacy, but I saw fit to post it here since these issues seem to apply to privacy-oriented communities as a whole.

This sub is about privacy. Every day we get people who are just realizing for the first time just how much of their information is out there beyond their control. They come here looking for help and advice and sometimes to share their successes. Often times they have little or no technical knowledge, let alone an advanced understanding of information security or how to compile their own apps from source, but they want to learn.

So it absolutely fucking pains me when I see gatekeepers shitposting all over newbies. People get downvoted into oblivion for suggesting that it might be difficult for grandma to compile her own Android app instead of installing from the Play store. Comments like "you're a slave if you have a Facebook account" get circle-jerked. Within the past week I've witnessed:

OP: "Where can I find a privacy-respecting news app?" Redditor: "Ugh, why would you even want an app? That's so stupid."

OP: "I'm so happy, I just deleted my Google data!" Redditor: "You're cute, you think they actually deleted it? Guess again, moron."

OP: "I'm leaving Gmail. What do you think of ProtonMail?" Redditor: "Anything less than self-hosted is a waste of time. Why don't you just go back to AOL?"

This attitude does nothing to further privacy. It just makes the redditor look like a jackass gatekeeper. Worse, it makes the community toxic. People come here to learn about privacy. Everyday, regular, not-tech-savvy people. Instead of mocking them for being a "noob", let's welcome them into the fray and help them improve their privacy posture.

Every "noob" we scare off runs back to Google. Report gatekeeping and shitposting when you see it.

Let's pretend there was a consensus of malicious internet companies, and a sufficient number of people wished to strip those companies of their power. That group of people could establish a new network of DNS servers which specifically refuse to resolve the perceived malicious domains.

Let's just take one example. Let's pretend there is a website that serves video content, but this website tracks its users aggressively. Their domain is example.com.

Even some of the users who dislike the example.com service might want to be able to consume the video content, so there could even be proxy servers which would provide access to the content without allowing things like the tracking javascript to leak through.

I'm massively oversimplifying the technical details of how this would be achieved, but I'm just curious if anyone else had considered this possibility.

Maybe DNS is the wrong layer to execute this political action, but I feel like there exists a technical approach to such political action.

Edit: I completely glossed over the SSL/CA implications of the proxying service, not because I don't know the implications exist, but because it's a complicated topic, and I'm not exactly sure how best to resolve it, especially for users who would not understand the risks of sharing things like user credentials over a proxy service like this.

I hope this can serve more as a discussion starting point than a prescription.

One more clarification: I imagine something like one or more Political Action Committees running these DNS servers. That person or group of people would choose a list of domains to blacklist, and deny DNS resolution for those domains or resolve to 127.0.0.1.

I found this video and I will admit that the title definitely triggered me when I saw it. However, it talks about how studies and surveys can reveal information about a group of people, and thus if someone knows that you're apart of that given group, they can infer information about you.

I'd move to hear what you all think. Do you agree with him?