
Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a  privacy-focused search engine based in Europe - jonmccull
https://vivaldi.com/blog/search-with-qwant-in-vivaldi/
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novaRom
From their privacy policy:

"When you install Vivaldi browser, each installation profile is assigned a
unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message
using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours
containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time
since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing
the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the
resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of
this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their
geographical distribution."

Is this information enough for them to uniquely identify and track each user?

~~~
gaellelo
Hey, here's Gaëlle Medeiros-Logeay, Data Protection Officer at Vivaldi.

The data we collect is not personally identifiable, and we try to keep it as
minimal as possible. :)

We're not in the business of collecting data, and we do not sell them to
advertisers like others do. The collected data helps us to understand where
most of our users come from.

Our stats show us which country our users are located in and nothing more. We
don't do data profiling. We just look at trends.

We don't see any browsing history, it's all stored locally so that only you
can see your own browsing history. If you use Sync, then the data is
encrypted.

If you want to read more about our privacy, this article wrote about us at
length on this topic: [https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/30/vivaldi-browser-
privacy/](https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/30/vivaldi-browser-privacy/)

Hope this clarifies things for you. :)

~~~
unpopular42
> The data we collect is not personally identifiable, and we try to keep it as
> minimal as possible. :)

Hey Gaëlle!

Huh? Unique ID + /24 + screen resolution is the opposite of "not personally
identifiable". You may not use it that way _yet_ , but that's only because no
one applied enough incentive or force _yet_.

~~~
adrianN
There aren't all that many Vivaldi users out there so the /24 is probably
already enough to uniquely identify the user in many cases.

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scns
Tried it for some time, got annoyed pretty fast by the tabloidheadlines they
include into the page. Switched back to duckduckgo

~~~
plop_
I agree, but they also provide a lite page (should be the default).

[https://lite.qwant.com/](https://lite.qwant.com/)

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drngdds
Searx seems like the best option in this space, since you can host your own
instance and avoid having to trust anyone (except the developers, assuming you
didn't audit the code yourself).

~~~
m3nu
Sadly Searx is just a scraper for Google and some others. So it doesn't give
you any real freedom. Popular instances also get blocked now and then.

~~~
ealhad
[https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8fde028...](https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8fde0285-0139-4769-b989-63e064a2385b.png)

A few others indeed.

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onyva
Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don’t understand why people still believe a for-
profit Corp will prioritize users rights.

... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he
was forced out of Mozilla.

~~~
hawski
Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation,
which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course
not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely a
perspective.

I for one think that modern web standards are used by most web site authors
not in users interests. Therefore implementing those standards in good faith
not necessarily mean implementing an _user_ agent. Firefox is great, but web
as it is mostly served is increasingly not. I just would like to see an user
agent dedicated to users, not standards. Even if it would mean omitting JS and
most of CSS. I would use it for information seeking and Firefox for necessary
web apps.

~~~
dao-
> Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation,
> which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course
> not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely
> a perspective.

"wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation" is the more important part
here, because the Foundation is nonprofit and eventually has authority over
the corporation, so the latter can't decide on its own to sell out.

The corporation needs to be able to make a profit not as an end in itself but
to make strategic savings in case things get more rough with Google.

~~~
rhabarba
From the Wikipedia:

> Net income: US$103.8 million (2016)

I wonder how rough things must be.

~~~
dao-
Pretty rough, but that's not a too unrealistic scenario given that Google is a
pretty aggressive competitor in the browser market and there are hardly any
other search engines that would be good enough to be the default in a
mainstream browser. (Mozilla tried with Yahoo but they couldn't deliver the
quality users have come to expect.)

Have you checked Mozilla's expenses too? It has around 1200 employees, I
think, and a few offices around the world, data center costs etc.. If you want
to be able to independently keep that going for a few years, you need a big
war chest.

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Raed667
I have been using Qwant for a couple of months now, overall it gets to the
point, but I find myself using "!g" quite often (which is also the case with
duckduckgo ..

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threatofrain
How is Qwant advantageous over DuckDuckGo?

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TomK32
I've been using Qwant for half a year now and like it a lot.

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konart
>Results are unavailable, please check your connection or try again

okay

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Val_
A privacy-first search engine using Bing API, it's a joke.

~~~
simias
As long as Bing doesn't get direct access to the metadata of the device making
the query why does it matter? I assume they're not using the Bing API straight
from the client browser, are they? They're basically proxy-ing Bing's results
and add their own features on top of that. At least that's how I understand
it.

~~~
lumberjack
Privacy is one but not the only problem with centralised web search. The other
big problem is manipulation of search results. Of course it already happens
for ads and filesharing and that is bad. But worst is when they do it for
political reasons. Bing cannot tell who you are, but they can still promote
their own agenda by tweaking the ranking of search results. Blog against MS?
Send it to the 10th page or hide it entirely. Of course I use here a very
innocuous example. You can imagine the power of tweaking search results. You
can change the perception of reality, essentially.

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ailideex
So on their landing page - they say "We are cookie-free" \- but they put these
values in localstorage:

    
    
        h_user: 9019.....
        user: {"isLogged":false,"error":false,"userSetting":{"searchRegionKey":"GB","searchMode":0,"safeSearch":1,"enableSuggest":true,"targetBlank":true,"showTrends":1,"showSmartNews":true,"showSmartVideos":true,"showSmartSocial":true,"selectTheme":0,"showFavicon":true,"continentKey":"WESTERNEUROPE","searchLanguageKey":"en","interfaceLanguageKey":"en_gb"},"version":28,"fieldsValidity":{}}
    
    

So ... kinda bullshit.

~~~
IlGrigiore
But those are just cookies related to the functionality and the
personalization of the search page. I guess they could have written that they
do not have any tracking cookies, but I guess the intent was to be clear to
the average user: "we are cookie free", therefore we do not track you.

~~~
ChrisSD
Why don't they just say "we do not track you". That's accurate (hopefully) and
clear to everybody.

