All companies that have to pay for infrastructure, servers, employees and invoices naturally need income, as is logical and legitimate. Some use contextual ads, that is, tool ads on a DIY page. This may be annoying, but it does not put privacy at risk, but if it does, when the ads are based on the user's history and data (surveillance advertising), this is what is massively used by US companies.

That there are other models to create income, for example what Proton does, with its Freemium services. The free Proton products (all of which are OpenSource, by the way), naturally have limited functions, but they do not require trafficking in user data, because they are financed through Premium services.

Andisearch, the first search engine on the market that used AI with its own language model, is strictly anonymous, no tracking or logging with sandboxed results, it is 100% free and private, for the future they plan to create a premium model for companies with specific functions for collaboration and special business functionalities, to finance the free version.

Vivaldi in new installations offers a selection of search engines (DDG, Ecosia, Startpage, etc.) and bookmarks, which pay a commission when the user uses them, if not, no, they are free to delete them, apart from a store with merch, upon insistence. from the users themselves sometime ago they also accept donations, probably also receive commissions from VAG, Mercedes, Polestar and Renault to include Vivaldi Automotive in their vehicles. All without trafficking in user data and without external investors so as not to lose independence, the mistake that Mozillla made when accepting Google as an investor. This is independent of having Google as the default search engine, since Google pays Mozilla and finances them, whether the user searches with Google or not.

It's the surveillance policy, selling user data, which is the risk and will destroy the free internet if we don't avoid it The ethics of a company respect to the user is the most important feature today, something that the big US companies don't have.