I mainly want to use Ecosia because they use their ad revenue to plant trees, something I can definitely get behind. But their privacy policy is somewhat concerning. Namely this part:

For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address (obfuscated), user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting.

Additionally, by default Ecosia sets a Bing-specific “Client ID” parameter to improve the quality of your search results. If your browser has “Do Not Track” enabled, we disable the “Client ID” automatically. You can also choose to disable this feature by modifying your user settings.

UMatrix also detected Ecosia connecting directly to Bing’s image servers whenever a search contains images. Though I feel that if I use Do Not Track, a VPN, and ensure my user agent string is sufficiently generic, Bing shouldn’t get any more data out of me than DuckDuckGo (my current search engine) would?

What do you think of Ecosia? Does the tree planting outweigh the privacy issues? Would you use it over something like DuckDuckGo?

  • @AgreeableLandscapeOP
    2•4 years ago

    Looking at the data they spend more on taxes and social security than they do actually planting trees. I’m no finance manger, but to me that doesn’t look like good value for money.

    I mean, they’re required to honour both by law, so it doesn’t seem fair to say they’re purposely not spending that money on trees. Also, it doesn’t cost you money so I’d say it’s better than nothing.

    I agree with you, but is the cost worth the reward? How much of your data needs to be sold and ads you need to see to plant just one tree?

    They actually do tell you what information they send to Bing (and they don’t permanently store your information at all) in their privacy policy, which I linked in the post, and I also proposed a way to defeat that amount of tracking immediately below pointing that out.

    • @thoughtcrime
      1•4 years ago

      Completely agree with you. What is u/stayawesome suggesting, for ecosia to stop paying its employees? Thats a no-go

      I use ecosia because, being european, it is not subjet to US’ NSLs as is DDG. I dont really know that much about what they forward to bing, but as DDG uses the same backend, I cant think there is much difference