[i_read_news]

From my understanding, the metrics from SearxNG are still privacy respecting, and searx never clearly defined what constitutes privacy enforcement or drew a clear line. Most active developers went to SearxNG for that reason, and searx was largely in maintenance mode for a long time. I had recently asked to clear the confusion, and honestly just made me think searx was passively abandoned already - they just made it official.

[johnklos]

From my reading of things, they (SearX) wanted to protect us (the people who use SearX) from ourselves (the people who run SearX).

In other words, marketing BS. If I don't want aggregate stats, I won't collect them. I'm a big person now and can decide that for myself, thanks.