Privacy

31798 readers

287 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Question about self-hosting in regards of privacy (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by Vexz@feddit.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

People always say it's the best in regards of privacy to self-host your own search engine. So I started doing that a while ago. But there's one thing I'm concerned about in regards of privacy when you self-host your own search engine.

Does it make any sense to self-host your search engine at home? See, I have a NAS with Docker. Inside Docker I ran instances of SearXNG and Whoogle. These search engines are just proxies for public search engines like Google. This means if I use my self-hosted search engine to search something, the search engine does the search and delivers the results to me. So for example SearXNG uses my public IP to search something on (for example) Google. That can't be better than using a public instance of SearXNG, Whoogle, LibreX and whatnot, right? So the best thing you can do is to rent a server in some cloud and host your private search engine there.

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 6 points 1 year ago

Correct. Best to rent a vps, host it their and let others use it too in order to hide which searches are yours

[–] bluetoque@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

I have the same concern, with regards to the IP address. However, my experience with the shared SearxNG instances is they are often throttled by the engines. So it's a trade-off. What about using a VPN?

[–] poVoq 1 points 1 year ago

It will still help against browser finger-printing and other such stuff, but yes the benefit is limited if it runs on the same connection.

[–] appel@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Would it be an option to route your self-hosted SearXNG container through a self-hosted open VPN container?

[–] Vexz@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for that hint. It might be possible to route all traffic of a docker container through a vpn connection. This way you could make SearXNG (or any other self hosted search engine in Docker) use a remote VPN server and make it prompt the searches. See here.