From September 2023, we will be gradually rolling out our new unique search offer. This will happen over several months and won’t apply to everyone at the same time. This means that when you search through Ecosia, we work with either Microsoft Bing or, with your consent, Google to provide you with search results and ads. In order to do this, we automatically collect data required by search partners to prevent bot attacks and ad fraud - which includes your IP address and search terms.
For a growing number of users we can now provide Google results and advertisements. In order to supply these results and ads, Google requires a cookie to be set on your browser and access to your device’s local storage to store information. We will ask for your consent before doing this and if you do not agree, we will provide non-personalized results from Microsoft Bing.
In order to provide non-personalized Microsoft Bing results and ads, we are contractually obliged to implement Microsoft Clarity to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, as well as sharing your IP address and search terms. This behavioral data is captured in individual search sessions and is not tied to a user profile unless you consent. The processing of this data is necessary for the provision of our service. Although Ecosia does not use this information, it is used by Microsoft Bing for site and advertising optimization, as well as fraud protection. For more information about how Microsoft collects and uses your data, visit Microsoft’s privacy statement and Microsoft Clarity documentation.
Microsoft Bing does also offer personalized search results and ads. This service requires a cookie to be set on your browser which creates a personal profile. We will ask for your consent before enabling this and you can change your choice at any time in your cookie preferences. More information on cookies and how to take control of your preferences can be found in the “What about cookies?” section.
You might want to inform yourself whether tree NFTs actually achieve anything useful in the real world.
The questionable privacy policy doesn’t negate the actual work being done. I’m no longer using them, but calling it tree NFTs is misguided
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/pPg_vDMeiJY?si=pmeBAG7HDXhmAOgV&t=73
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Well, fuck the trees then, I guess.
It sounds like they don’t really have a choice in this unless they completely switch up their internal search engines, right? Like, it’s a shame, but not exactly something they’re to blame for? Or am I missing something?
I am not blaming them as much as I am reevaluating the level of privacy I’m sacrificing given the additional context in their updated statement
- ‘Their’ privacy policy now roughly equates to “We don’t really do anything but you should read the privacy policy of Microsoft (and optionally Google).” It feels less like an alternative search engine and more like a middle-man that still passes the data along. Speaking of which:
- Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but they are touting ‘non-personalized results and ads’ as if that’s the privacy end goal, when it’s really just the side-effect of companies not having data on you. Based on their updated policy, they are giving the illusion of privacy via ‘non-personalized results’ while capturing/sharing searches, behaviors & IP address that I’m guessing can easily be deanonymized @ Microsoft.
Maybe I’m misreading something? It reads like the same experience of using Bing without the marginal benefit of a personalized experience.
I think it’s a catch-22 because I’d imagine a sizeable cohort of their pro-environment demographic is likely pro-privacy/anti-‘corporations knowing everything about you’, and so while the increase in usefulness in data can increase their charitable donations, it will rub lots of users the wrong way.
Isn’t the new part just the google stuff? They have always been using bing results.
Wayback Machine ftw. Here is August 2023:
The only piece of personal information we collect is the IP address your internet connection runs over at a given moment. Why? We need to protect ourselves against “spammers”, meaning ad fraud and bots trying to up-rank certain search results. Your IP address is anonymised after one week or less. For example, 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX.
We still use Microsoft Bing to deliver search results, but using them through Ecosia is very different from searching on Bing directly. At Microsoft or Google, you are likely to have personal IDs which track you across all of their services: email, calendar, video platform, gaming, video conferencing, maps, locations, location history, and so on.
We don’t sell any data to anyone and we don’t buy any data either.
We are interested in the performance of our social media advertising, as well as answering your search results. We would like to know if users stay with us once they have seen our ads and installed us. This helps us run the right advertising campaigns on the right platforms. We never let those platforms know your search terms, though. We only share whether you are still searching with us or not. We only do so with your consent and you can remove that consent at any time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230729030327/https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
No, it appears you are correct. Looks like they’re being bullied by Google and Microsoft.
I only use Ecosia as my search engine at work, so I’m not too concerned since I’ve got bigger fish to fry at work, such as Zoom and Google Drive.
Since the comments are full of alternative usecases like ddg and brave search, I just leave this here:
I’ll join in. Just signed up for the trial of Kagi after seeing an article on here and I’ve already subscribed. I don’t miss google at all and am excited to play with some of the innovating features (lenses look neat).
I’ve been testing it for a week or so after seeing it around the fediverse; my initial experience was bumpy (they truncate passwords at 71 characters, and while the registration page is supposed to notify you of that, it did not and let me complete registration with a much longer password, which then failed to login on other devices since the 71 char limit - this issue has been filed). But I have liked the results for all (30ish) queries except one, which was a very niche search. Even G didn’t really pull helpful answers, though it was better than Kagi.
Probably going to sub at the $5 tier after I use my trial searches.
So this is a search aggregator that searches across the main sites? And they’re hosted by individuals and I can create my own instance if I want?
That’s actually real cool
