Empowering Choice: Firefox Partners with Qwant for a Better Web : firefox

[–] [email protected] 63 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

Mozilla didn't choose privacy. Qwant sends you IP address to Microsoft when you search on their platform. If you want a more responsible search engine, DuckDuckGo is still the way to go.

The information collected by Qwant includes...

first name, last name, email address
hash of the IP address
User Agent
market segment of a request
date and time of the visit
information of the country and the chosen language
search keywords
where a user came from
type of device used
source of visit
operating system
major browser version

Qwant may (will) transfer to Microsoft:

your full IP address
Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent
The first three bytes of your IP address;
The approximate geographic area at the origin of the search, at the scale of a region or city;
The hash generated from your IP address and User Agent

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

doesn't duckduckgo do the same thing at this point with tracker links? it also uses bing

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What tracker links?

DuckDuckGo's policy is much less specific but makes it a point that they aren't sending your exact IP address to Microsoft or anybody else for any reason. Among other, IMO even better policies.

we share anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device), but we never share any information with them that could tie your searches or website visits to you personally, or that could allow them to create a history of your individual search queries or the sites you browse.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

last we checked they preserved the tracker links bing themselves would use on results, which you had to opt out of.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Can you be more specific?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would use SearxNG instead, using a public instance like searx.be. It is really lightweight, gets results from multiple indexes and is very privacy-friendly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Honestly, I set up SearxNG on my own server, and it's not very nice to use, not very configurable and doesn't return high quality results. It's also kinda slow. Maybe I'm missing something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It is recommended to use a public instance because it makes it harder to fingerprint you off of your searches. It gets most results from Google and Bing, so you will have similar search results. I haven't experienced any slowness yet, so I can't say anything about that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

@isVeryLoud @hash0772 I had similar experience. I was able to resolve the slowness by enabling swap on the vps. What was worst is that over time Bing and Google API changed and it stopped working, took quite long troubleshooting. Occasionaly I would hit some kind of rate limit and got nothing from Google. It was too much hassle and not worth the vps cost.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm sorry but that is not correct. In the link that you shared to their privacy statement it is explicitly stated that they do not collect your identity when using the service. They say that your identity " is the information we use to ensure that you are who you say you are when you make a de-listing request, report or create an account. This includes: first name, last name, email address."

Furthermore, unlike duckduckgo which to my knowledge relies entirely on Bing's search index, Qwant does actually index the web itself and only uses the Bing index when a search returns insufficient hits from their own index. When they query the microsoft index they send the following data along: "Search keywords; Information about the browser you are using (the User Agent); The first three bytes of your IP address; The approximate geographic area at the origin of the search, at the scale of a region or city; The salty hash generated from your IP address, your User Agent and a salt changing no later than every 3 months; A random token generated by Qwant (aiming to limit data cross-checking)."

I do not know much about DuckDuckGo, but from an initial read the privacy policy is much more vague than Qwant's, not mentioning any specific information that is shared. As they are a US company, they are also not covered by the general data protection regulation.

In general, both search engines seem to do a good job at protecting users' privacy, which to me sounds like something that should be encouraged, not polluted with misinformation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You're probably wondering why I say "your full IP address" versus "partial IP address"; you quote the policy correctly but you missed a separate but crucial section in the privacy policy:

In addition, for security purposes and reliability of our partner’s services (detection of spam, automated activity, fraudulent clicks on advertisements …), Qwant may also collect and transfer to this partner [Microsoft Ireland] your full IP address.

The transfer happens separately from searches, sure, but if two requests get sent to Microsoft at the same time and with the same parsable information (the full IP address from the security query can be used to link a partial IP address and city-level location from a search query) then it seems like Qwant is giving Microsoft the ability, even if unintentionally, to link IP address and search.

I do not know much about DuckDuckGo, but from an initial read the privacy policy is much more vague than Qwant's, not mentioning any specific information that is shared. As they are a US company, they are also not covered by the general data protection regulation.

I agree and I'll add a disclaimer or something. DuckDuckGo says this:

In order for our product to function, we share anonymous browser and device information with our hosting and content providers for security and display purposes (for example, that you’re using a mobile device )*

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Any company doing business with EU residents has to comply with GDPR, even if it is not from the EU.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Thank you for informing us. This is what I wanted to know.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

what are you making misleading claims about Qwant for??? if you click your own damn link you’ll see that the only case where they need to collect your name is if you make an account (completely unnecessary), make a de-listing request (to verify that you are who you say you are before removing something, otherwise i could just go and have jeff bezos removed), or if you report something.

also, 80% of your bullet points after “user agent” are redundant because they are literally just what makes up a user agent. newsflash: every single website you ever visit in your life collects your user agent because it needs to know whether to give you the mobile or the desktop version of the site. this has nothing to do with privacy in this case, you’re just slandering to slander

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I updated my comment to remove name and email. But I maintain the stuff after "user agent" isn't redundant because part of it is your IP address and another part is your location, neither of which appear to be included in your browser user agent string.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

They're getting the location from your IP

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Pass. Qwant has had its share of controversies, regardless their results aren't better than DDG.

If Mozilla was serious about this they would run their own Searx instance and let people choose what engines they wanted to use.

https://searx.space/

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Reading through the current Qwant privacy policy certainly doesn't alleviate any privacy concerns either....

Mozilla keeps building/buying, then abandoning things. I'm not sure if they're cut out for that project, and in my experience a SearX instance's effectiveness is mostly based on whether there are enough users for the data to be obfuscated, but so few that it doesn't get rate limited...

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Wtf is Qwant?

Edit: oh, OK, it's a search engine. Next questions, what is the nature of the "partnership" and how is this better or different than DDG?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

how is this better or different than DDG?

Qwant is using its own index ~~plus Bing~~. If I remember DDG only using Bing's index and DDG started to censored results in 2022.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Sometimes better search results than DDG (but about the same), EU based (France), offers a Openstreetmap based alternative to google maps (opposed to ddg using Apple Maps) and a slightly worse privacy policy are the main differences

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

This part of the post suggests that Qwant will not become the default search engine, but given the millions that Mozilla gets from Google it should not surprise anyone.

Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Too bad about the choice for qwant. I've been using them for many years and they have big flaws: they block visits from unsupported countries, so if you're traveling, you're fucked. They also started blocking ad blocking users and their main webpage is full of crap that you have to disable manually. Their support is non existing. And they use the same censorship as Microsoft. I moved to brave search recently

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Searxng and you live happily

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

There's no way Mozilla is replacing Google as the default, so what are they actually announcing here? I didn't read any actual results thats happening. Are they just adding Qwant as an option in the search engine settings?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Has anyone here used Qwant? I've seen it mentioned a handful of times but I've not tried it myself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I had used it for a while in the past. The results were surprisingly good. I have moved to other search engines to experiment since then, but I have nothing bad to say about my time with Qwant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I’ve been experimenting with other search engines recently so might give it a go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Which search engines do you use now?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Brave Search currently, but I am still in the experimenting and search engine-hopping phase. Henceforth, Brave Search is not my final search engine, either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. Which other ones have you tried? I'd be interesting in hearing what you thought of all of them!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

@dan @Adda Brave search is getting better and better. I'm personally using combination of DDG, Google. But atm I'm testing kagi.com. I want to write post on it, once I try the 100 free queries.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've used it a long time now. I find it to have much more relevant results than DDG did last time I tried.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I would love to but it's still unavailable in my country :/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This means Google isn't paying the millions to be the default anymore??

Seems to be an awful news then, that money was useful for development and a default is trivial to change

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I didn't see a line that suggests they're putting Qwant as default, only that they're making it available as a search provider, just as DuckDuckGo and others are.

They say:

Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Doesn't Mozilla rely on Google for default search? Does this change that relationship?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Doesn’t Mozilla rely on Google for default search?

and money...mainly the money.

Does this change that relationship?

Unknown at this time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah... Things like this partnership, plus publishing posts against things Google is doing (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/googles-protected-audience-protects-advertisers/), might spook Google a bit. Mozilla rely on receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Google every year. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The fact that Mozilla is so dependent on Google is the actual problem here, diversifying where they get funding from is precisely what they should be doing going forward.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Mozilla has diversified... By jumping into AI.

Spent $65-265 million on AI that we know of
Bought an AI company for an undisclosed sum and funded more AI research for unknown amounts
Brought AI to Kenya (in a move strangely reminiscent of cryptocurrency companies trying to fix the "unranked" problem

And shuttering previous diversification products and laying off staff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Saw that, totally can't imagine how any of that is going to backfire.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I definitely agree with you, but finding another partner to get hundreds of millions of dollars per year isn't trivial.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Sure, but finding more partners is crucial for long term survival, so if Mozilla never reaches out to anybody for fear of offending Google then they're always gonna be stuck in this sort of abusive relationship. Becoming so reliant on Google in the first place shouldn't have happened, but it's better to start fixing that sooner than later. It's also worth noting that the main reason Google funds FF is to protect themselves from antitrust litigation. As long as FF is around and gets a bit of usage, then Google can point to it to say that Chrome isn't a browser monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

But is Qwant going to be default?