• 27 Posts
  • 185 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • A few little things rather than one or two big things - email advertised as private but they won’t let you use anonymous addresses (like anonaddy or duck.com) for recovery addresses, an ever growing portfolio of products that seem unfinished or incomplete or lacking in standard features like they’re trying to corner the whole privacy market rather than making one or two products but making them really good, poor customer service and support as a continual theme throughout their existence.

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting they’re doing anything dodgy, I just feel that I don’t really trust them. They just make really odd choices and it all feels like a haphazard rush.


  • You would think that someone at Proton would’ve had the foresight to realise the reputational damage this (along with the LLM announcement) would do to the company.

    Without wanting to sound smart after the fact, I’ve been suspicious about Proton for years. I briefly had an email account with them but I could never quite shake the feeling there is something off about the whole company. This move just confirms to me I was correct to be suspicious.









  • Yes because:

    1. There is a visible action taking place. You are standing for something you believe in. This gives other people who may lack confidence or opportunity something to notice.

    2. Those in authority cannot claim what they do is an unopposed position.

    3. Those you are protesting on behalf of, even if they are going through hell, know that someone somewhere is not prepared to let their circumstances go unnoticed.

    4. Those you are protesting against know that someone sees what they are doing.


  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Kagi?
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    8 months ago

    I think the thing with open source (re: your free labour point) is that it’s entirely voluntary free labour - I know that wasn’t the thrust of your point but there are pros and cons to it. The lead dev could one day say ‘fuck it’ and walk away, but for a project of any size/popularity there’s a lot of people ready and willing to fork it or ask for ownership to be transferred. It’s not very often a very popular bit of code is totally abandoned.

    Open source, to me, offers a sort of peer review system. Most people developing open source stuff already care about code quality and privacy, contributors also do and the myriad of people using it have a core set of people who also do. That’s a lot of eyes. There’s also tools to diff code so its pretty easy to spot changes. And I do do that.

    But I take your wider point - it all eventually comes down to trust. But that’s true of legal requirements too. And also organisation behaviour. Brave for example have been caught at least 3 times doing very dodgy stuff and yet as far as I can tell they continue to grow. I don’t necessarily accept that one instance of law breaking or otherwise poor behaviour is instant death for a company. If it was, G and Meta would be long gone.

    All I can do is reiterate that all of us have different things that we choose to place some trust in and we all have different ways of assessing what leads us to trust. But at the end of the day, there are no cast iron guarantees.


  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Kagi?
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    8 months ago

    I self host just about every service I can, including search.

    You’re asking for a guarantee, which I’ve repeatedly admitted I can’t offer because absolutely no one can provide that. No provider, no service, no software. All we can do is decide what we each consider to be actions/behaviours indicative of trust and use their offering in a way that maximises privacy for us as individuals. I put more trust in software/services that has code that anyone can read, that has been independently audited, that is trusted by the community and possibly tested in a legal environment. You might put more trust in things like privacy policies and other legally binding documents. Neither of us can guarantee anything however. I’ve lost count of the number of companies who’ve violated privacy laws and users only find out years or even decades after the fact.

    But I’ll say it again - whats right for me might not be right for you and that’s fine.



  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Kagi?
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    8 months ago

    Again, I’m not considering them to be intentionally malicious or deceptive, I’m saying without the basics in place, we’re being asked to just trust them.

    I’m aware of the limitations you describe and you’re right that there’s no way to 100% guarantee anything, there has to be some element of trust. So the services/software I choose to use have done all the things I mention, or I run them locally. Does that mean they’re 100% perfect? No, of course not but the fact they’ve gone to great lengths to establish at least a basis for trust means a lot to me. Some of them have gone on to be tested in some sort of legal encounter where again, they performed well.

    Trust is a personal thing, we all have different perceptions of what makes an org trustable - if Kagi match yours, good for you.


  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Kagi?
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    8 months ago

    I don’t suspect or accuse them of anything. Quite the reverse - what I’m saying is that without things like open source code, privacy audits etc, we’re being asked to take their word for it all. They might well be the most privacy respecting company ever and they equally might not be. If you’re happy to take their word for it, that’s entirely your call. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m just answering OP’s question with my own opinion.


  • I’d just like to reassure Lemmy that there are a lot of us (Brits) who are fully aware of the shitness of our Imperial past and its negative (and still felt) effects on people all over the world.

    The only excuse I can offer for this persons stunning lack of tact and knowledge is that the Empire is not really taught in any meaningful way in British schools. It’s not unless one chooses to discover for oneself what our ancestors did that you can find out the true horrors of it all.



  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Kagi?
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    8 months ago

    Deciding to trust a provider - any provider - isn’t just any one thing. So, the most basic step to me is all the relevant code being open source. The next step is getting their infrastructure audited. The step after that is seeing what happens if they get court ordered to provide data.

    They do none of that and I’m just too cynical to accept ‘trust me bro’ as a convincing sales tactic.