danarel

I would also recommend reading this interview with the CEO of System1 to better understand their decision to invest in Startpage and their views on privacy.

https://thinkprivacy.ch/system1-interview/

You're not wrong (I am the author of this piece), but with time constraints (and my inability to write such a script) I modeled this "study" with that in mind.

It's why I chose terms in which I knew what results I wanted to begin with, and came up with the criteria before searching for them.

To run your study, I would have chosen to search terms I knew nothing about, and looked for results that better educated me. Through my method, I knew by searching for "Rust" I was looking for the programming language.

My method was not meant to be scientific, but I used as much of the scientific method as possible without the ability to a blind or double blind study.

I mean, you could just look at a timeline of private search engines and verify if the statement is true.

I am left to wonder then, do you say the same of Brave? They are owned by an advertising company whose website once read "we know where your customers visit."? Or that Brave is funded by a Facebook board member? Or of DuckDuckGo which sends browser, country, and partial IP addresses to it's closest partner Microsoft?

The thing is, many privacy companies are owned or funded by those who do or have made money in surveillance capitalism, but you have to look at the companies history and it's actions.

Saying "how can you trust them because..." without taking a few minutes to do some basic research is really lazy and faux intellectualism.

When I was part of the PrivacyTools.io team, we heavily researched this and interviewed people involved and came to the conclusion Startpage hasn't changed their mission at all and in fact has been incredibly transparent about this partnership.

https://blog.privacytools.io/relisting-startpage/

DDG is located in the US and logs partial IP information. Startpage is headquartered (and under legal jurisdiction) of The Netherlands. Also, it's a bit naive to call System1 just an advertising company. It's a bit larger of a company than that. Sadly, an ex-Startpage consultant did a lot work to confuse and manipulate users into not understanding their partnership.

Opera VPN collects user data. It's right in their policy. It's not a privacy respecting service.

My data was leaked in Verifications.io's breach and I don't think I have even heard of this company...

This just made for a good reminder I needed to close this account.