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)
That phenomenon is called counter-signaling, which I first ran into listening to Dan Jurafsky making the point that if a menu uses the word "fresh", its a low-brow restaurant. A high-brow restaurant would never use the word "fresh" -- the freshness is implicit in the other signals.
"People of average education show off the studied
regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a
teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial
points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close
friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal
credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials
even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes
accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify
accusations with a response."
Discovered this very early in life when I found out that the more adults tell kids that something is "fun", the less it's true. If it really was fun, it would be obvious and wouldn't need to be said ;)
Ah yes I always see cheap food packaging that says “gourmet” or some other obviously unfitting epithet. Words printed on packaging are free and somehow folks who market cheap foods think stuff like that helps.
You imply that a website that does not mention tree planting at all, plants the most trees.
Interesting.
What would you recommend people to put on their website when they genuinely would want to provide a search engine that plants trees?
Do you imply matrix.org being a protocol for closed islands for insecure, centralized silence instead of a protocol for an open network for secure, decentralized communication?
Please start finding actual arguments instead of spreading superficial unfounded commentary.
> You imply that a website that does not mention tree planting at all, plants the most trees. Interesting.
They actually don't imply that but the exact opposite, which is "the website that talks the most about tree planting, plants the least". The way you phrase it reverses that logical implication, which is not what they said.
>> What would you recommend people to put on their website when they genuinely would want to provide a search engine that plants trees?
Everything except lies. Simple.
PS: I think the idea of a search engine like that is great (assuming the tree planting is done in a responsible way without destroy ecosystems). But I don't think implying to be privacy friendly when you're not really is great.
Pragmatically, a regular full audit by an external entity might produce interesting results. Who is their auditor? That might be a pertinent detail to provide.
if those people wanted to plant trees, they would. when they announce that's what they're doing, it's not about the trees anymore, but about communication and branding. and communication and branding is poised with lies and misleading.
I’ve always found the “we value your privacy” an interesting _admission_. They definitely put a _value_ on your privacy by selling it! They exactly what other are willing to pay for it.
But to be honest Parler is also going into this basket, they also overstate freedom of speech, which is in the long run practically impossible for any centralized service especially for those operated in the USA.
I don’t believe any particular company cares about anything other than maximizing their profit.
You lose your freedom of assembly if you use it to form mobs with the objective of perpetrating crimes.
You lose your freedom of speech if you use it to form unlawful assemblies with the objective of perpetrating crimes.
Trump was banned because he sent a mob of Q-indoctrinated lunatics to the Capitol with the likely objective of kidnapping senators and staging a coup (they were photographed carrying zip-tie handcuffs in Senate chambers).
It was a good idea to ban Trump, let's keep it that way. He rarely said anything of value anyways, only reality show trash talk, hate speech and pseudoscience.
> “ We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler)”
Saying this is not open-mindedness or support for free speech.
The president and Parler both have acted as direct, unequivocal instruments of fomenting and directing violence, especially with racist and fascist nature.
Banning them from any platforms is in no way connected to free speech whatsoever. President Trump’s Twitter account and Free Speech are two completely disconnected, unrelated concepts.
It requires fascism-sympathizing and racism-sympathizing to even suggest otherwise.
At this point, anything of the vein like, “Banning Trump from Twitter is unfair censorship” or “Banning Parler from app stores is unfair censorship” is just hate speech disguised as if it’s an attempt to uphold freedom.
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, especially since they lay claim to protect their user's privacy, shouldn't, in my eyes, have anything to do with Facebook regardless of where their integration points are.
That said, my gripe isn't with their Facebook integration, it is with their dishonest privacy posture when the fine print reveals something else. They can do way better.
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.
Microsoft knows what they both do, but ain't saying. Maybe they have the same contract or each syndidation partner has a unique one. Probably the latter. Trying getting a syndication partnership where you don't agree to pass on some part of the IP; I've not heard of anyone getting that but anecdotes is all I have. Microsoft (or Google in the case of their syndication partners) are not going to tell us.
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.
Thanks, I get where you're coming from (that: privacy absolutists tend to throw the baby out with the bath water) but you misunderstand the point I was making. My gripe is with their claim that they protect privacy. If you're going to store user-data as-is for 7 days even if anonymized later and stored forever (for some definition of "anonymization", which is not a trivial thing to do), it doesn't come close to "protecting" anything.
I don't have a horse in this fight, but I do build FOSS anti-surveillance / anti-censorship apps, and take offense at such misleading messaging.
> It's very important to remember the legal and liability requirements associated with privacy policies.
Why isn't it important to not mislead with headlines and FAQs?
> Therefor, the default is to over-report.
Wouldn't have to if one really took measures to "protect privacy" but when one can't / don't / won't ... then one may at least have the courtesy to be upfront about it.
> Nor does it mean they do not take privacy very seriously.
They claim to "protect your privacy". Their words, not mine. But the fine-print doesn't inspire confidence, even if written in CMA-style (though, that's a lame excuse). Or as they say, why not put money where your mouth is.
> 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.
Thanks but it is not I that's hypocritical. You have it the other way around, I am afraid.
> italicized "may"s,
Here's the clause: "The anonymised data is saved for as long as is necessary for the evaluation. The data is not transferred to any third party. We will not access your data located outside of the app, such as your calendar, photos, messages or such like unless you have permitted us to do so."
> Suggesting that any product that collects data to run the business...
You're extrapolating the critique to the entire world, which you can, but you then don't get to dismiss it for one entity just because "the rest of the world can't survive without data collection". Ecosia may not need personal data to be running a viable tech business (which at its core is a wrapper on top of Bing with ad revenue going to afforestation efforts).
> ...good people do to craft a viable balance in today's difficult tech ecosystem.
Like someone else suggested in this thread: Just because you plant trees, you don't suddenly have a claim to being an "angel". Ecosia may have good people behind them or not, but I do care about honesty and earnestness.
Also, I write FOSS software full-time, do I qualify for your "good people" list? :D
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.
Thank you, I was about to point that out as well. Ecosia advertises with "we plant trees" because that is what people understand and want to hear. Under the hood, there is a lot more going on. Ecosia does not only support one but multiple projects with a variety of goals, including reforestation, preservation etc.
What's also nice is the fact that their are extremely transparent about their finances. They are a registered non profit in Germany and they frequently publish their finances and other insights, which is always extremely interesting
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.
>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.
Anyone who did a little research knows that a market based solution like carbon taxes is going to solve the problem very effectively. The concept is very simple. Calculate how much damage a ton of CO2 is causing and tax companies so that they pay for the damage they caused. In some cases it is easier to treat the damage. In others it is easier to reduce the damage. The market gets to decide what is most efficient.
The problem is that there are lots of people who are not deep in the subject who believe that it is just a money grab or that if you are going to give them the money back they would prefer no taxation in the first place.
This has lead to Germany introducing a carbon price instead of a carbon tax. The difference? You're not getting your money back. People's allergy to taxes backfired. Kind of ironic.
Taxing CO2 emissions of imports is another problem. You would have to introduce tariffs to nudge big foreign polluters to implement their own CO2 tax.
That obviously depends with what happens with the trees that could not have been preserved.
If you burn a tree you set almost it's entire absorbed CO2 free.
On the other hand, a recently planted tree has absorbed almost nothing - it will take decades if not longer to grow to a big one - reaching the level of absorbed CO2 of the other tree before it has been burned.
Nevertheless, a tree at the place of an older one can help binding CO2 when the old tree is used such that the CO2 is not released to the atmopshere, such as for a well-crafted table (which could be used for decades, too).
But don't forget that it usually is not just removing one tree - usually big areas are cut out, which includes the huge ecosystems around trees in untouched nature.
Though, always keep in mind, this is not a choice. The goal should be to preserve as much as possible (especially untouched ecosystems) as well as planting as much as possible.
There's more to climate change than CO2... Forests create micro climates; prevent soil erosion; help fixate water and nutrients; produce food for local populations, thus providing them income and reducing need to ship as much food to rural areas; improve yields of agriculture, so you don't need to water as much, or use as much ferilizer... And Ecosia is invested is projects to help with all of this (read their blog).
This single track kindset of climate change fight is why we get so much green washing.
CO2 isn't the only reason to take care of forests. If we replace a naturally grown forests with newly planted one we destroy an existing thriving habitat and replace it, in most cases, with a monoculture. This has tragic impact on biodiversity.
Here's a good article you might want to read. It also says that natural forests are actually better at capturing CO2.
That's probably true, but when a forest is burned, that's decades of absorbed CO2 that goes back to the atmosphere, which would take another decades to be absorbed by the new trees.
When a forest burns, most of what burns is new growth: grass, leaves, needles, branches, etc. Rarely do trees fully incinerate, even in the hottest spots. I imagine the charred matchsticks left behind still contain the majority of a tree’s carbon.
Old forests better retain water and thus are able to grow better - marginally accumulate more biomass. I'm NOT against planting trees but against overdoing it as I explain in the other comment.
You're absolutely right, but here's a counter point of view. People are not more likely to use Ecosia and click ads than they are to use Google and click ads. Ecosia is trying to give you a "greener" option to something you will do anyway.
But then you're having to ignore an even "greener" option. That's using and promoting ad blocking in general to lessen the environmental impact of consumerism. The thing with Ecosia is that it seems to ignore the damaging impact consumerism has on the environment. Instead, it encourages it by urging you to expose yourself and your friends to advertising.
But then that's up to you, right? Ecosia does not encourage you to buy anything, but if you search for products, it suggests places where you could buy it. I don't get your point.
Trees plant naturally themselves (keyword:natural succession) anytime when the land is ready (like not overgrazed, desertified, drained). In such locations the tree planting mania is superfluous even to the point of rejecting spontaneously grown shrubs/trees as "weeds". Such land is needlessly cleared and replanted with trees, with loss of biodiversity. I'm not exaggerating here in europe it happens all the time.
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?
When you search on DDG, it sends it to bing via their servers. Bing doesnt know you are searching, it can only see duckduckgo and the search term, not you.
DDG gets results back from bing, sometimes modifying it with it's own results to make them better.
> But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?
Yes. Most of it is Bing.
Ecosia doesn't proxy it properly. It sends it to bing from you browser, not from Ecosia's servers. Bing knows your IP and sets cookies to track you. You can observe it with dev tools.
Yeah, I think they were talking about the index, and I'm not sure that's true any more. I don't remember the sources, but I remember reading that DDG started relying more on their own indexing and less on Bing about a year ago. And from some testing I did some time ago, it was the case that only 50-60% of the search results on DDG were similar to Bing - meaning it's still a significant source, but not so much as to say DDG is just proxying requests.
DDG does a proper proxy from my side. Bing is not loaded when I load duckduckgo.com, unlike ecosia which loads bing.net and bing.com subdomains right in my browser.
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.
If you add Pinterest to your blocklist [1], does that count as better results? That said, we have our own index of websites posted on HN and other interesting communities. It will add filters like size and "privacy rank". Unfortunately it's not possible to experiment with it in production yet.
Could even become something like an interactive search experience e.g. having a button 'remove all search results from this domain' or 'add domain to blocklist'.
When we can afford it -- we will definitely run multiple independent audits to verify our privacy claims. At the moment there isn't any simple way to do it. You'll have to take my word for it.
We are currently not making money, but when we do we'll be very transparent about it including (if we reach that point), about interceptor purchases.
Feel free to send me any feedback/suggestions/comments to david at okeano.com if you find any quirks. Appreciate it :)
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."
As a counter-argument, is it not a little obnoxious to use Ecosia with your ad-blocker turned on?
What's the point of using Ecosia if not to help them fund-raise for their environmental projects? Why not use Google or Bing directly (with an ad-blocker) and save the Ecosia the bandwidth costs?
You're right. I don't use it, and I don't promote it. But I don't think it's very clear to everyone who does that Ecosia needs you to click ads. Many environmentalists are also anti-consumerists, and I suspect would hesitate to use or promote this search engine if its reliance on advertising were made clearer.
I guess it's quite a difficult thing to communicate without encouraging users to click on ads, which presumably would get them in hot water with the ad networks.
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
Indeed, but with the typical HN audience that has a higher anti-ad bias than the rest of the population, I was thinking it was important to remind that merely switching to Ecosia will not totally help them
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.
Hmm.. since every company promises a focus on privacy, isn't the bigger differentiator for the user that you run your own crawler? Do you use only your own crawling data?
Most definitely though Mojeek was the first on that front and yes, the search index is entirely from crawling the web independently. UK based. Our Twitter handle is very responsive if you ever need further info.
Thank you for the feedback. I tried to reproduce but could not. I'd be grateful if you could use the feedback button at the bottom of the search results as it may be result-specific wrt any horizontal scroll.
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 wouldn't trust an add-on company to be able to plant trees properly, and why would we? I'd rather they be the middle man between me and the tree planting companies.
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'd pay 5-10 bucks a month without a second thought. That'd amount to something like 420-840 bucks to DDG since I've roughly started using it (somewhere around Snowden leaks).
It's not a larger amount than they would earn from me if I didn't use an ad-blocker, but it's 100% larger than they've earned from me over the years.
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
The billable $300 an hour go to your company. So if your company can charge for more time because you spend more time searching, that's actually good for your employer!
Haha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary time-sinks as possible. Being higher-cost than competitors (or hell, even higher-cost without competitors) without adding proportionate value (e.g. when you add a time-sink) will lose you business. Second, as immoral as it may sound, plenty of companies or rather employees within companies don't write time purely on a time-spent basis. Time spent is one of the variables, but you'll mostly look at sensibility and industry practices, too. If you did project X for a client for $10k and can modify it and do it for $8k for client Y the week after, you're likely still going to charge something close to $10k even if you didn't spend the time. And vice versa, if you bid aggressively on a project claiming you can do it in less-than-ideal amount of time and spend more time anyway, you'll get push-back and will not be able to charge it fully. In other words, operational efficiencies are helpful in a world in which you agree to get paid on a time-spent basis.
I'm only half serious ;) Of course this doesn't scale to infinity (work as slowly as possible), but I think some "tactical" inefficiencies are part of almost every project (especially in the public sector). But I didn't want to accuse you or your company of doing this!
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.
...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