[Semaphor]

> How would you solve the issue of self-censorship when the exact identity of a searcher is known?

What do you mean with that?

> Can you Guarantee the privacy of searches and that you will never sell search history data?

I think that’s literally impossible to do?

FWIW, selling data would probably not be worth it, and ruin them. It’s supposed to be pretty expensive (early discussions are around $10-$20 a month) while only having a tiny amount of users (10s of thousands). At least for me, that aligns their incentives properly. And of course, they are bootstrapped without any VC money.

[gostsamo]

Self-censorship is the behavior where one does not perform certain searches because their interest in the topic will become known to others. This might include health information, sexual interests, political views or other sensitive topics. The fact that the search engine has your name, address, and payment info means that they can associate you with 100% certainty to everything you search for which can have negative consequences for the user under different scenarios.

In regard to selling the data, I've seen businesses where they sell user info just as a side project to balance the sheets. It will b an issue only if one is caught. Somewhere there I looked around the website but I couldn't even find where is the HQ and under which jurisdiction they operate. The privacy policy had lots of technical details, but not legal one.

It would be interesting if like Signal they can validate an user but provenly cannot associate the account with any actions. This might be an issue for billing and tiered plans though.

[Semaphor]

I pinged their devs, especially regarding their location. I’d assume US as that’s where their founder is according to his personal website [0], but I agree it would be better to have that information there.

Thanks for the explanation. I can only repeat that I don’t think this is solvable. Unlike Signal, which uses E2E this is not possible here, so whatever promises Kagi makes will always have to stay promises as they’ll need to know the content of your search and for what account it is (as your settings influence the results) to give the right reply. At least that’s how I understand it.

[0]: https://vladimir.prelovac.com/

[niemandhier]

I think it it solvable:

1st Allow users to share the token by which they are identified. 2nd Implement a 3rd party website that offers a 'free tier' via token roulette.

That will generate noise in search results, making it hard to pin a particular search on someone. Optimally users would be able to decide how much 'noise generating searches' they allow.

Off course that would only work if paying users would be volume / rate limited.

[Melatonic]

Could potentially go the Mulvad approach and allow mailing in of cash for an anonymous user ID (numbers only) and then you enforce DoT and DoH everywhere? Kagi itself would still have access to your search queries and could identify you buy your public IP but it would be a decent step in the right direction

[gostsamo]

Thanks, it would be interesting to see new solutions in the space.