Niche content that either is hard to find elsewhere or you will be using something like TikTok which is in no way better.

I even excluded it from my search engines results.

Fair enough , I suppose things have changed since it was written and now some things intersect.

A great comeback, however, the root of the nothing to hide argument is itself flawed, as was written in the article - that is the point.

Understanding privacy as I have set forth reveals the flaw of the nothing to hide argument at its roots. Many commentators who respond to the argument attempt a direct refutation by trying to point to things that people would want to hide. But the problem with the nothing to hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide. As Bruce Schneier aptly notes, the nothing to hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.” 75 The deeper problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. But understanding privacy as a plurality of related problems demonstrates that concealment of bad things is just one among many problems caused by government programs such as the NSA surveillance and data mining. In the categories in my taxonomy, several problems are implicated.

The end conclusion is essentially “it’s ok if there’s a warrant”

I think it’s a fair compromise. Let’s not be naive, there’s lots of evil in the world. As was stated in the article: “This is a mechanism of oversight—it forces government officials to justify their suspicions to a neutral judge or magistrate before engaging in the tactic.”

If it’s the government doing it, it’s one thing, but this completely avoids any discussion of private companies collecting every single piece of data they possibly can on you to sell.

Data collection falls under a different category of privacy issues, than government surveillance, as he was pointing out in his article, so conflating them is unhelpful.

And the lawyers that somehow lost the argument on whether spam mail harms people is astounding. “I could have gotten a letter telling me I had an inheritance, but I get so much spam mail it could have gotten lost. It’s impossible to know the extent of the harms I’ve endured due to the amount my data has been sold.”

Not sure what you’re on about here, wasn’t mentioned there at all.

use local bank i guess

Did it stop working for you?

I have them mostly for the disposable cards, although a lot of sites I noticed don’t allow you to use them.

Strangely enough the app still works perfectly for me since I installed it like a couple of months back without google play services (through Aurora store). But if they start blocking me maybe I will just delete my account and go elsewhere.

Would be awesome if instead of govs pushing age verification and similar bullshit they would shift the focus to cars

This looks promising ! I am currently paying 10$ / month for this other service that is basically a front-end for openrouter. Was searching to switch since :

1. Don’t like the founder and his braindead push for LLM’s.
2. Everything is hosted in the US.
3. I have cut back on my LLM usage by a lot, to the point that I don’t think I spend 10$ worth of tokens. GPT 20B , Gemma 4 27B and DeepSeek v4 flash end up being like 90% of my usage and I try to use them sparingly, keep answers, conversations short.

I do wonder what to do about the frontend? My mentioned service has a pretty good web app with decent UI and it worked on mobile as well without much problems. I actually end up using LLM’s quite often on mobile as I read a lot on it.

I don’t think there is one. When I researched like a year back basically every brand was made in China. Maybe you can find some obscure one? I couldn’t, so I went with Bosch and am quite happy with it.

https://uruky.com/?il=en

My writeup : https://programming.dev/post/54318939/25190665

Well I think it’s a balancing act. Ultimately, can you prove to me that something like DuckDuckGo or Kagi aren’t ran secretly by NSA as a sort of honeypot? So it’s the same with Uruky. They are a company and I doubt anyone can prove to you that they’re not for example behind your back selling your data to some broker. You just have to feel their vibes and finally take their word for it.

If you can’t trust then stick with open source and self-host, that is the only way. Read the interview that I linked to, that got me to try them out.

They don’t do free trials and you can’t “test out” the search without paying. The dev said it’s because they’re really small and don’t want to collect more data than necessary to fight off abuse. So you do have to trust and pay that 5$ to try them out.

But once you do it’s a cakewalk to verify that theyre not just a bing frontend or whatever it is that you’re worried.

At the end of the day they’re a company and you can’t verify anything 100%. If you’re this paranoid then maybe it’s not for you.

Because you can choose which index you want to use and then you can compare it against bing?

the article

Eye roll 🙄

Check out Uruky Check my comment ^ for a writeup.

Uruky I’ve been using them for a few months, this interview is what made me switch. It’s a small team of 2 people (a guy and his wife), they have a handful of search indexes (EUSP, Linkup, Serper, Marginalia, Mojeek, PriEco, Mwmbl), and you can customize which of them you want to use.

I use EUSP index and I have to say it’s pretty good, it finds MOST things i’m looking for and when it doesn’t, at the bottom of the page there’s “Try with Linkup / Serper / Mojeek / Marginalia” so you can click around and see if the other indexes match something that your main one missed. And at the top there’s “Try in Ecosia / Google / DuckduckGo” (I sometimes use DDG and Ecosia).

In the settings there’s lots of customization options for the UI.

They’ve been clear they won’t include AI at all in this search engine.

You can pay with crypto, cash or card.

They are EU-based (EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers) (Mojeek is based in UK, but whatever).

They have bangs and you can enable DDG / Kagi bangs.

You can create your own web fallback engines (like they have ddg/ ecosia/ google) by default.

You’re not required to give out your personal details when registering, you literally only get an account number.

5 eur / month.

Yeah idk I just like it. It’s minimal and does what I need, they’ve been adding new features and it feels good supporting big tech independent search indexes, services.

A year or two back when I tried independent search indexes they were all pretty bad and I concluded you can’t really avoid using Bing / Google indexes. But now? EUSP is veeery decent and in combination with the other, smaller ones they cover a lot of ground. I would say it’s in the same tier as Bing, but slightly worse than Google. But for 90% of the searches ? It’s good enough and you can always just use Ecosia when you need Google or Serper index (directly in Uruky).

I see people mention Kagi.

I used Kagi for 3 months when they gave me a free trial maybe a year back. It’s a good product and probably the best search engine out there. However, it’s also more expensive than Uruky (10$/ month) and more importantly they use Yandex as one of their search indexes.. They’ve also removed all mentions of this fact from their help pages. They also use brave index. You can’t choose to not use them and in general they havent been very transparent about the whole thing (as to how much they use each index)

By the way Ecosia relies on Google, not bing. They’ve switched quite a long time ago.

It’s not paywalled. They just require to log in. Overall 404media is pretty solid.