Ecosia – A search engine that plants trees
Ecosia starts their privacy policy with, &quot;We protect your privacy.&quot;<p>...but when you dig in, they:<p>1. Use Facebook for &quot;conversion tracking&quot;.<p>2. <i>May</i> collect messages, photos, calendar information if you&#x27;re using the app.<p>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&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d trust the effectiveness of their anonymization, given they <i>may</i> store logs (and other metrics) &quot;as long as necessary&quot;.<p>4. Integrate with advertisement platform run by Bing on the search pages (and so they &#x27;don&#x27;t control the data Bing collects&#x27;).<p>Who reads privacy policies, right? Everyone just reads the headlines and FAQs.<p>&quot;Ecosia is a “privacy friendly” search engine. We take user privacy very seriously.&quot; <i>Right</i>. I wish they were upfront and admitted to collecting data instead of trying hard to convince they don&#x27;t do so for nefarious purposes (in their own eyes, that is).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.ecosia.org&#x2F;privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.ecosia.org&#x2F;privacy</a>