They can claim what they want; the fact remains that I have to trust them. If I use Brave or DDG or even Google, I can do things to obfuscate my identity from them. Kagi is the only search engine that requires users to authenticate, and ties that authentication to a method of payment that can be trivially tied to the user's identity. As far as the user is able to verify, that makes them the least private search engine.
Even if they're telling the truth, if they receive a national security warrant, they'll start collecting that information secretly. Hence my interest in a warrant canary.
That is fair. Few things we are doing that I'd like to point out:
- Users can register with any email. We really do not verify or need this apart from having a way to have an account, which we need to authorize payments
- Some users suggested using crypto to obfuscate identity but this is not as straightforward and does not work as good with subscriptions
