Kagi/Orion status update: First three months
While I am a happy paying Kagi customer, their stance on privacy is nonsensical and amounts to saying &quot;We super duper pinky promise that we won&#x27;t use your data&quot;<p>From the Anonymity section: &quot;For example your parents can know everything about you and still fully respect your privacy.&quot;<p>Ok, but if anyone thinks I trust a company the way I trust my parents they are sorely mistaken, and I certainly wouldn&#x27;t want my parents to have an easily searchable record of everything I&#x27;ve ever searched for online, the same way a search engine provider does.<p>The complexity of accepting crypto payments is totally understandable. If that&#x27;s the reason Kagi does not prioritize anonymity then that is understandable, but the justification that &quot;you don&#x27;t really want privacy anyway&quot; is unnecessary.<p>&quot;We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design. This is a software architecture decision (we simply don’t need this) and there is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.&quot;<p>&quot;Software architecture decision&quot; is meaningless. The only guarantee that data will not be collected and stored is a technological, probably cryptographic one.<p>If an organization is in a position to gain intimate knowledge of your life and habits, they have the ability to influence your life and that of others. Pinky swearing not to do so is a lot like following someone around with a camera while repeating &quot;it&#x27;s just for a video&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-R5WjfL2ZAg</a><p>I don&#x27;t expect Kagi to accept crypto, and I&#x27;ll keep paying just because I&#x27;ll jump at an opportunity to pay with my money rather than with my data. However, given that they decouple their service from the need to track users, I would have expected them to prioritize anonymity wherever possible as the next logical step.<p>If the justification was technological it would be understandable, but their reassurance that there is nothing to be concerned about is itself concerning.