Ecosia starts their privacy policy with, "We protect your privacy."
...but when you dig in, they:
1. Use Facebook for "conversion tracking".
2. May collect messages, photos, calendar information if you're using the app.
3. Hold on to personally identifiable information for upto 7 days post which they (pseudo)anonymize it to store it indefinitely. Now, without more information on how they do so, I'm not sure I'd trust the effectiveness of their anonymization, given they may store logs (and other metrics) "as long as necessary".
4. Integrate with advertisement platform run by Bing on the search pages (and so they 'don't control the data Bing collects').
Who reads privacy policies, right? Everyone just reads the headlines and FAQs.
"Ecosia is a “privacy friendly” search engine. We take user privacy very seriously." Right. I wish they were upfront and admitted to collecting data instead of trying hard to convince they don't do so for nefarious purposes (in their own eyes, that is).
Rule #1 on the internet: the more a website screams something, the less it's true.
Examples:
"Our mission is to organize the world's information." (proceeds to organize the world's commercial brands and spam people based on what they do online)
"We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler)
"We value your privacy." (Every big"tech"/cloud company ever that sells your data and has an automated system in place to pass all data on to the NSA, authorities and anybody willing to buy data)
"Download now" (not actually now, but after you get our download manager adware/cryptolocker)
"Download full functional version for free now" (actually a limited trial that you get to use after you dump personal info)
"Free trial, unlimited music downloads, cancel any time" (proceed to charge your credit card even though you cancelled the limited DRM download service on time. I'm looking at you Amazon Music)
The only place where Ecosia uses Facebook tracking, in on Marketing landing pages. If you don't land there from Facebook, i.e. If you go to the website directly, there is no Facebook tracking.
Ecosia requires a User-Agent header else will block user and ask her to solve captcha. Few if any search engines ask for this additional identifier. Google. Bing, DuckDuckGo all work fine without it. Does Ecosia's privacy documentation explain why Ecosia is different.
I think they mean: "We don't store all your search results for years and monetize you, like the other major search engines. Especially the biggest one, u know what I mean."
I'm not weighing in on Ecosia specifically (no direct knowledge), but...
It's very important to remember the legal and liability requirements associated with privacy policies. In many jurisdictions, you are subject to liability if you collect something that was not disclosed in your privacy policy.
Therefor, the default is to over-report. If there's a chance that something is collected, better to put it into the privacy policy. This is similar to the famous "California Cancer Warning" - the incentives to include everything, no matter the materiality, ultimately render the warnings useless.
Any central server will "collect" everything typed into a text box. If it allows registration, requires password verification, perhaps offers customer support, it will disclose collection of "personally identifiable information" including email, phone number, possibly computer-specific information like browser, IP, installed version info, etc. Hosting on Amazon means it's shared with a 3rd party. And so on.
Also, this seems crazy to the privacy conscious, but many consumers want Facebook integration. They ask for social logins, and easy ways to share via social media. Once those features are enabled to satisfy their users, they're subject to all the cruft that comes with those APIs - and need to disclose those in their privacy policies.
None of the above means that a site is nefariously using the data it collects. Nor does it mean they do not take privacy very seriously.
The interconnectedness of the web, legal requirements, litigious privacy advocates, and overarching privacy regulations (none of which are bad on their own) combine to make the Privacy Policy an almost useless signal of a company's actual privacy posture.
That's why it's highly unfair to Ecosia for OP to so strongly imply they lie (or are, at best, misleading and hypocritical) and use your data nefariously, simply by excerpting a few lines of the Privacy Policy. The scare quotes, italicized "may"s, rhetorical questions, and other devices written to instill doubt and distrust makes me wonder about the agenda behind the message, frankly.
Privacy is extremely important, but so is customer service and a viable business model. Suggesting that any product that collects data to run the business (and properly discloses it, as Ecosia does) will "do so for nefarious purposes" and does not "take user privacy very seriously" ("Right.") is unfair and undermines the work good people do to craft a viable balance in today's difficult tech ecosystem.
Ecosia uses planting trees as the poster child, because that's what people want to hear. But in reality, there's a lot more going on. Ecosia produces 200% of it's estimated energy footprint in solar. They also protect forests, and help populations in Africa with their forests and with adapting to a life without deforestation.
At least on this climate policy simulator built by MIT, planting trees is indeed not a big winner for achieving climate goals. And actually, neither is limiting deforestation. (But we should do those things for other great reasons like preserving and restoring habitat.) This simulator doesn't address wetlands specifically, unfortunately.
If you really want to see what gets emissions down, move the carbon price slider.
According to tons of leading economists, we can make a steadily rising fee on carbon emissions economically sustainable and politically viable by returning the net revenue from the fee to households as carbon dividends.
I was confused what you meant by DDG properly proxying stuff. When arguing for DDG, people often say that you can still use !g to get google results (for example) and that sounds great, but when you try it, it doesn't proxy at all, you are literally redirected to Google and it doesn't add anything. But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?
Shameless plug, I run Okeano which intends to spend 80% of profits to clean up the ocean by purchasing river interceptors from the Ocean Cleanup Project.
I don't know if they still do this, but not long ago they used to try and get you to switch off your ad blocker with an obnoxious message saying "Ads plant trees! We’ve detected that you are using an ad blocker. We plant trees thanks to income earned from ads. Please disable your ad blocker for Ecosia so that we can keep on planting."
Yes that's true. But you know how on YouTube you only receive ad money after you have a certain number of views? And the more views the bigger the % of ad revenue? Bing Ads is the same
I tried Ecosia for probably 2-3 weeks. It is awful, correction, bing is awful. The ads are totally not related to my search and my search results are much worse than Google. Had to uninstall it.
I’d love to plant a few ecosia-sponsored trees in my city. but, of course, it’s not possible do that here because they’re not _actually_ planting trees. They’re just giving money to someone else.
I was using Ecosia for a number of weeks and did achieve some 80 planted trees over the course of that period.
However, I eventually was so frustrated over the poor search results that I did move back to DDG.
Ecosia‘s intentions might be noble and worth supporting, but I cannot really follow how one can stay with them when the overall experience is so poor.
I don’t even mind some possible privacy issues as noted above but it all comes down to being at least comparably good to Google and DDG. Which is sadly not the case with Ecosia.
Good to see that Apple included them as an alternative default search engine choice. Apparently it's quite popular in the USA and Germany according to Similarweb.
I work in a hospital. They have switched the default search engine to ecosia. All adverts are blocked, so it cant help plant trees, and because it's bing, the carbon footprint is then positive (rather than at least neutral with Google). So it's all virtue signalling.
Worst of all, we get worse results, all the time, and I think this will indirectly affect patient care.
I am always surprised when (be it greenwashing or not) companies call themselves "search engine" when in fact ... they actually aren't a search "engine".
They don't have any indexing/searching technology, they just re-use another search technology in white-label.
We can criticize Google for many things, but at least those guys really built a technology, from scratch.
TL;DR: Calling Ecosia a search engine is like calling yourself a "restaurant" when all you're actually doing is reheating factory-prepared meals.
I hate this thing with a passion, my corporate job mandates it and you can't turn it off, so Ecosia is the default search engine. 9/10 times I type something in Chrome's URL bar it's 'Google'. There's no opt-out.
Ecosia is fine but I just don't get the corporate policy. It's making my work a lot more inefficient, and when I worked for clients (I currently work for internal clients which isn't chargeable) I billed $300 per hour.
An Ecosia search is worth half a cent, you need 45 searches to plant one tree.
Suppose I do 20 searches in a day, that's 10 cents. Suppose the extra search to Google takes 3 seconds, at a billabe rate of $300 that's 25 cents times 20 searches is 500 cents, about 50x whatever Ecosia is gaining. I just don't get why my employer can't just pay 20 cents into Ecosia's tree fund, get the same marketing, contribute 2x as much to trees, save 25x as much money on this thing and save me frustration.
If I then figure that (1) a search for Google (I don't use Ecosia search results at all) is not contributing any revenue at all and (2) even those who use Ecosia search results are getting worse and less time-efficient information versus Google, the economics of simply letting people use Google instead of Ecosia (Bing) and contributing the equivalent in money, makes even more sense.
And then (3) corporate actively does not want you to go shopping online during work. This idea to show ads during workhours when employees just want search results is a ridiculous idea.
Other than that I think Ecosia is a great idea, but it must be opt-outable.
tl;dr I hate big corporates.
In other words, at the cost of 8 cents per second in billable time, I'm generating half a cent
We had a developer from Ecosia on the Raspberry Pi Livestream a few months back, if anyone is interested, along with a code along Scratch video for the kids.
Ecosia, the Android app that is a browser with this search engine as a default, installed a search bar into my taskbar without my consent. It disappeared recently. Does anyone know how to get it back?
While I like the idea of a privacy-focused search engine eg. DuckDuckGo, I think the climate is a more important issue and I figure at least Ecosia is based in the EU where they're more likely to comply with the GDPR. 99% of my searches can be found by any engine and it's trivial to add a shortcut to other engines, so I don't base my default choice on search results (within reason of course).
That's my reasoning around the two common issues anyway.
[+] [-] ignoramous|5 years ago|reply
...but when you dig in, they:
1. Use Facebook for "conversion tracking".
2. May collect messages, photos, calendar information if you're using the app.
3. Hold on to personally identifiable information for upto 7 days post which they (pseudo)anonymize it to store it indefinitely. Now, without more information on how they do so, I'm not sure I'd trust the effectiveness of their anonymization, given they may store logs (and other metrics) "as long as necessary".
4. Integrate with advertisement platform run by Bing on the search pages (and so they 'don't control the data Bing collects').
Who reads privacy policies, right? Everyone just reads the headlines and FAQs.
"Ecosia is a “privacy friendly” search engine. We take user privacy very seriously." Right. I wish they were upfront and admitted to collecting data instead of trying hard to convince they don't do so for nefarious purposes (in their own eyes, that is).
https://info.ecosia.org/privacy
[+] [-] bboygravity|5 years ago|reply
Examples:
"Our mission is to organize the world's information." (proceeds to organize the world's commercial brands and spam people based on what they do online)
"We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler)
"We value your privacy." (Every big"tech"/cloud company ever that sells your data and has an automated system in place to pass all data on to the NSA, authorities and anybody willing to buy data)
"Download now" (not actually now, but after you get our download manager adware/cryptolocker)
"Download full functional version for free now" (actually a limited trial that you get to use after you dump personal info)
"Free trial, unlimited music downloads, cancel any time" (proceed to charge your credit card even though you cancelled the limited DRM download service on time. I'm looking at you Amazon Music)
[+] [-] toper-centage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beardog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nalekberov|5 years ago|reply
I don’t mind if they use environmental issues for their marketing interests, but this is so ridiculous to have such privacy policy.
[+] [-] Bellamy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agar|5 years ago|reply
It's very important to remember the legal and liability requirements associated with privacy policies. In many jurisdictions, you are subject to liability if you collect something that was not disclosed in your privacy policy.
Therefor, the default is to over-report. If there's a chance that something is collected, better to put it into the privacy policy. This is similar to the famous "California Cancer Warning" - the incentives to include everything, no matter the materiality, ultimately render the warnings useless.
Any central server will "collect" everything typed into a text box. If it allows registration, requires password verification, perhaps offers customer support, it will disclose collection of "personally identifiable information" including email, phone number, possibly computer-specific information like browser, IP, installed version info, etc. Hosting on Amazon means it's shared with a 3rd party. And so on.
Also, this seems crazy to the privacy conscious, but many consumers want Facebook integration. They ask for social logins, and easy ways to share via social media. Once those features are enabled to satisfy their users, they're subject to all the cruft that comes with those APIs - and need to disclose those in their privacy policies.
None of the above means that a site is nefariously using the data it collects. Nor does it mean they do not take privacy very seriously.
The interconnectedness of the web, legal requirements, litigious privacy advocates, and overarching privacy regulations (none of which are bad on their own) combine to make the Privacy Policy an almost useless signal of a company's actual privacy posture.
That's why it's highly unfair to Ecosia for OP to so strongly imply they lie (or are, at best, misleading and hypocritical) and use your data nefariously, simply by excerpting a few lines of the Privacy Policy. The scare quotes, italicized "may"s, rhetorical questions, and other devices written to instill doubt and distrust makes me wonder about the agenda behind the message, frankly.
Privacy is extremely important, but so is customer service and a viable business model. Suggesting that any product that collects data to run the business (and properly discloses it, as Ecosia does) will "do so for nefarious purposes" and does not "take user privacy very seriously" ("Right.") is unfair and undermines the work good people do to craft a viable balance in today's difficult tech ecosystem.
[+] [-] acvny|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rini17|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toper-centage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EcoMonkey|5 years ago|reply
If you really want to see what gets emissions down, move the carbon price slider.
https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....
According to tons of leading economists, we can make a steadily rising fee on carbon emissions economically sustainable and politically viable by returning the net revenue from the fee to households as carbon dividends.
https://econstatement.org/
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k1m|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitkat_new|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffpip|5 years ago|reply
Might as well use Google for better search results than bing. Unless you really wanna help plant trees.
DDG does a proper proxy.
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abc-xyz|5 years ago|reply
How do you know? I mean they’re closed source and you have no idea what data they send to Microsoft’s Bing and Advertising APIs.
[+] [-] dgut|5 years ago|reply
We support domain blocklist natively and are (very) privacy friendly: https://okeano.com/privacy
https://okeano.com
[+] [-] arendtio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowfaxRodeo|5 years ago|reply
But is there any way of verifying if what you're saying is true?
[+] [-] necovek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juniperplant|5 years ago|reply
...Is it supposed to be empty?
[+] [-] rakoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k1m|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toper-centage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitkat_new|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mg|5 years ago|reply
https://www.gnod.com/search/
You can switch on Ecosia when you click on "Select Engines".
[+] [-] ricardo81|5 years ago|reply
Disclosure, I work there
[+] [-] ColinHayhurst|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/SearchEngineMap/lists
Who uses what:
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
[+] [-] vorticalbox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fiahil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indysigners|5 years ago|reply
However, I eventually was so frustrated over the poor search results that I did move back to DDG.
Ecosia‘s intentions might be noble and worth supporting, but I cannot really follow how one can stay with them when the overall experience is so poor.
I don’t even mind some possible privacy issues as noted above but it all comes down to being at least comparably good to Google and DDG. Which is sadly not the case with Ecosia.
[+] [-] CodeGlitch|5 years ago|reply
How would you be getting different results from them?
[+] [-] ricardo81|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuartbman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nalekberov|5 years ago|reply
Ok, not too bad.
[+] [-] calmworm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixti60|5 years ago|reply
They don't have any indexing/searching technology, they just re-use another search technology in white-label.
We can criticize Google for many things, but at least those guys really built a technology, from scratch.
TL;DR: Calling Ecosia a search engine is like calling yourself a "restaurant" when all you're actually doing is reheating factory-prepared meals.
[+] [-] kitkat_new|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|5 years ago|reply
Ecosia is fine but I just don't get the corporate policy. It's making my work a lot more inefficient, and when I worked for clients (I currently work for internal clients which isn't chargeable) I billed $300 per hour.
An Ecosia search is worth half a cent, you need 45 searches to plant one tree.
Suppose I do 20 searches in a day, that's 10 cents. Suppose the extra search to Google takes 3 seconds, at a billabe rate of $300 that's 25 cents times 20 searches is 500 cents, about 50x whatever Ecosia is gaining. I just don't get why my employer can't just pay 20 cents into Ecosia's tree fund, get the same marketing, contribute 2x as much to trees, save 25x as much money on this thing and save me frustration.
If I then figure that (1) a search for Google (I don't use Ecosia search results at all) is not contributing any revenue at all and (2) even those who use Ecosia search results are getting worse and less time-efficient information versus Google, the economics of simply letting people use Google instead of Ecosia (Bing) and contributing the equivalent in money, makes even more sense.
And then (3) corporate actively does not want you to go shopping online during work. This idea to show ads during workhours when employees just want search results is a ridiculous idea.
Other than that I think Ecosia is a great idea, but it must be opt-outable.
tl;dr I hate big corporates.
In other words, at the cost of 8 cents per second in billable time, I'm generating half a cent
[+] [-] Normille|5 years ago|reply
You might almost say that, reading them, I couldn't see the wood, for the trees.
[+] [-] MarcScott|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMlaVVr0X98
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/tree...
[+] [-] Can_Not|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niutech|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corney91|5 years ago|reply
While I like the idea of a privacy-focused search engine eg. DuckDuckGo, I think the climate is a more important issue and I figure at least Ecosia is based in the EU where they're more likely to comply with the GDPR. 99% of my searches can be found by any engine and it's trivial to add a shortcut to other engines, so I don't base my default choice on search results (within reason of course).
That's my reasoning around the two common issues anyway.