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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#181

Post by lolinder »

mfiro wrote: post #146
lolinder wrote: post #78

The T-shirt thing is dumb and a waste of funds, but TFA describing it as "owning" a T-shirt factory is an exaggeration that makes me question most of the framing of the rest of the article. They partnered with an existing entity in Serbia, what they did set up was the means to distribute them. Still not a great look and definitely still a waste of funds, but if every criticism takes this same form—take a legitimate c…

> If not, I'll get to enjoy it while I can. Sure, but what happens with your information after that is also very important. What's for me very concerning after reading the article is not a T-Shirt factory or burning budget, but the their attitude towards privacy.

For my part, I trust that they aren't logging my searches and I don't put any sensitive information into the fields that are persistent. If someone eventually buys Kagi then they'll be able to learn that I block Pinterest and boost MDN, which is way less information than Google collects and stores about me, and it's information I'm happy to divulge to get the service I want.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#182

Post by drcongo »

sph wrote: post #168
Tomte wrote: post #4

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are. Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how…

Yeah, I flagged this as the post feels completely unhinged to me, like the kind of ranting I used to get in emails from a schizophrenic friend.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#183

Post by carlosjobim »

Kuinox wrote: post #178
carlosjobim wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An e-mail by itself is not PII, it has to be connected to other personal data. When companies use Stripe for payments, those other personal data are cared for by Stripe. There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.

> There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong. > ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, [...] https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/ A name is PII, as stated by…

You're misunderstanding. The name by itself is not personal data, but data connected to a name is.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#185

Post by mekoka »

magistr4te wrote: post #85
nebulous1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture. Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.

Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any kind of non-symathetic interaction. In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam. But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was cle…

There's probably some backstory between Vlad and Lori there.

But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case about not wanting to engage.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#186

Post by Terretta »

kklimonda wrote: post #55
yreg wrote: post #29

I've read the first third of the article and I didn't get what's the author's problem with Kagi. What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts. Then I scrolled through the rest of it and read the very last screenshot. That one looks pretty bad. > people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users > unless t…

For me, and probably a lot of other people who moved from other search engines, long-term viability of Kagi is important - heck, that's the reason I've decided it's worth paying some money for search. Given that, I'd expect them to be very frugal with their spendings. Burning money on T-shirts, on another Browser, AI "improvements", Kagi Email (wtf? first time I've heard of it) show that they have incredibly startupy…

Every entrepreneur obsesses about some competitor or some business model.

You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.

If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind. Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth about product market fit.

Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom" experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of the growth plan.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#187

Post by t8sr »

sph wrote: post #168
Tomte wrote: post #4

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are. Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how…

At the risk of sounding grumpy, a big difference between the tech community today and in the Usenet days is that the Usenet crowd's interpersonal skills weren't two standard deviations to the left of the mean at your local Target.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#189

Post by sph »

fireflash38 wrote: post #155
nebulous1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture. Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.

One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way. Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.

Another thing you don't quite seen in real life: strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to later post it for the whole world to see, to point and laugh.

The Internet has turned us into sociopaths.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#190

Post by arghwhat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #54
arghwhat wrote: post #7

Vlad's interpretation of GDPR is both horribly wrong and very concerning. Personally Identifiable Information includes anything that can be used to uncover a person's identity. An email address is PII, as it can be used to identify which person their data relates to - and they do have data, at the very least a user account and settings but likely also logs. Full names, phone numbers or IP addresses are also PII - if…

An e-mail by itself is not PII, it has to be connected to other personal data. When companies use Stripe for payments, those other personal data are cared for by Stripe. There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.

This is wrong on all points. GDPR quotes that directly contradict this below.

Quoting GDPR Article 4, point 1 (https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/):

> ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

And Recital 30 (https://gdpr.eu/recital-30-online-identifiers-for-profiling-...), which gives some more examples of identifiable information such as IP addresses:

> Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.

There is also the quote from the Danish Datatilsyn (https://www.datatilsynet.dk/english/fundamental-concepts-/wh...) also makes some more examples and explicitly highlight that is is PII even when it must first be combined with other data:

> Personal data may, for example, include information on name, address, e-mail address, personal identification number, registration number, photo, fingerprints, diagnostics, biological material, when it is possible to identify a person from the data or in combination with other data. It is said that the information is “personally identifiable”.

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An email address is obvious PII because it is a globally unique identifier representing a way of contacting a specific person. You can find the name of the owner separately and correlate it with your stored data, thus identifying the person.

Even if you store nothing else, the email reveals that you have an association with the user, but you most likely also have data that ties activity to the email such as the user logging in and using your service in any way or form.

> There are people who argue that just the name of a person is PII and they are wrong.

A person's name is the most obvious case of personally identifiable information.

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