ecosia financial reports: https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
Plant trees while you search the web
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#22I used ecosia for a period of few months, and stopped when I read this their privacy policy( https://info.ecosia.org/privacy#privacy-policy-section-7 ): > For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting. So when a search is done, our IP address is send to Bing. I…
> We don’t create personal profiles of you based on your search history. We actually anonymize all searches within one week. > Many web services collect user data in order to sell it without asking your permission. We don’t sell your data or your searches to advertising companies. > We protect your searches from potential eavesdroppers with a securely encrypted connection. This way we make sure that nobody between yo…
> And the last one would be a lie considering Bing can see it.
How would that be a lie. They protect from eavesdroppers, as in someone intercepting the connection and trying to extract data being transmitted within a system. Bing is part of the whole system, not a third party trying to eavesdrop. Finally, they say they don't allow anyone between you and them - which is different from allowing between them and a third party, but I'm sure they would use an encrypted connection even when communicating with Bing.
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#23I remember there was a link on HN which had a list of sites similar to this which are greener in general (i.e. which plant trees, or which use only green energy like solar, etc). I've been searching for it but couldn't find it. If someone has it, can they post it ? Thanks!
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a strong advocate for digital privacy and opposed to the majority of data collection that occurs, but this comment is FUD. None of the info that you listed would be private if you used Bing normally, so if you're worried about them having that info you'd need to stop using search engines all together >So when a search is done, our IP address is send to Bing. Explain why you believe that's a negative? If you use B…
>Explain why you believe that's a negative? If you use Bing normally they would know your IP as well I'm a bit uncomfortable in letting MicroSoft associate my IP with what I search daily. I use GitHub and Linkedin and most of the time I'm logged in to at least one of those services. Now I don't know for sure if Bing associates these searches to my account based on the IP(someone can shed some light on this?). StartPa…
I definitely understand the desire to not have one's IP tied to their search history/browsing in some cases, but as this service makes no mention of being an anonymous or private search engine I don't think your critique is an actual issue with the service. Your use case simply doesn't match the purpose of this search engine
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#25I remember there was a link on HN which had a list of sites similar to this which are greener in general (i.e. which plant trees, or which use only green energy like solar, etc). I've been searching for it but couldn't find it. If someone has it, can they post it ? Thanks!
Could it be https://ethical.net/resources/?
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#26Previous discussion with interesting comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324766
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#27If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted. I think it's important to point this out, because in their marketing, they make it sound as if searching alone is enough. There's also this little counter in the upper right corner. 45 searches (on average) are required to plant a tree. Of course, only if you click on an ad. You could even argue th…
What if I repeatedly click on ads by advertisers I dislike?
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We don’t create personal profiles of you based on your search history. We actually anonymize all searches within one week. > Many web services collect user data in order to sell it without asking your permission. We don’t sell your data or your searches to advertising companies. > We protect your searches from potential eavesdroppers with a securely encrypted connection. This way we make sure that nobody between yo…
> And the last one would be a lie considering Bing can see it. How would that be a lie. They protect from eavesdroppers, as in someone intercepting the connection and trying to extract data being transmitted within a system. Bing is part of the whole system, not a third party trying to eavesdrop. Finally, they say they don't allow anyone between you and them - which is different from allowing between them and a third…
That’s true. I guess I jumped the gun on that one. However, “nobody between you and us” still feels disingenuous because you have to dig quite a bit to find out that they use Bing on the backend and then leave concluding that “us” also includes Microsoft as the responsibility of the user. The average user isn’t going to make that connection because they’re not likely to be reading through the privacy policy or digging through the FAQ to discover they use Bing.
I think their page touting “privacy” should clearly indicate that they use Bing and that your privacy is ultimately beholden to Microsoft, not Ecosia, especially since Ecosia is happy to send unique identifiers to Bing for personalized search results as default.
It feels like a deftly move to offload their own responsibility to then be able to tout privacy as a selling point because they themselves don’t do anything with your information, Microsoft does.
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#29If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted. I think it's important to point this out, because in their marketing, they make it sound as if searching alone is enough. There's also this little counter in the upper right corner. 45 searches (on average) are required to plant a tree. Of course, only if you click on an ad. You could even argue th…
> If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted.
Do you have a source/reference for this?
Re: Plant trees while you search the web
#30This really feels like greenwashing to me.
The purpose of ads is (1) to make you buy something you didn't need before the ad made you aware of it, or (2) to make you choose the advertised brand amongst competing brands when you buy a product comparable to the advertised one.
Runaway consumption is what has gotten us into this ecological mess in the first place.
Watching ads to replant trees just sounds very strange.