Turns out Kagi does do advertising

They promote their search engine but their users don’t get to see ads. I don’t know what’s wrong about that. Every company advertises with its products. I don’t see what’s reprehensible about that.

We did not say we maintain anonmity, but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.

They’re right, anonymity and privacy are two different things. Since you have to pay to use Kagi, you’re not anonymous. But they allegedly don’t know what you as the user search for when using their search engine. So they’re being honest here and how can honesty be bad here? Anyways, we’re on privacy@lemmy.ml, not anonymity@lemmy.ml or whatever.

“AI is mentioned zero times”

While I still give you this one, they’re technically correct. The word “AI” isn’t there but they mention AI features, haha. It’s a bit debatable since Vlad said “kagi.com” - which doesn’t mention AI or AI tools. Only when you go to the pricing page there are mentions of AI tools.

Blog post or article - whatever. The effect is the same: It’s on the internet, people read it and get influenced. Just because I picked the wrong word doesn’t kill my point. I’m sure you get what I meant.

Just try it. You can always cancel your subscription if you don’t like it (or just pay once without subscribing). I’ve been using it for half a year now and absolutely love it.

I get that but it’s a dick move by the author of that article to publicly speak bad about a product and then don’t even wanna listen to what that person who made that product has to say to defend it. Especially if there’s some false information that get’s spread by that article. I’m not saying anything written in that article is true or false - just explaining the situation from Vlad’s view.

They allegedly don’t know their user’s search queries. That’s how it’s allegedly private.

To me it’s understandable. Imagine you start a project like this that grows over the years and you even have some employees after a while. Now someone writes an article about your project with accusations that are wrong (at least in your mind). Wouldn’t you be pissed either? At least I can’t imagine anyone who could just ignore that.

They know the names of their customers but they don’t know their search queries. There’s the privacy. At least that’s what they said. Since Kagi isn’t Open Source it always comes down to trust.

Gotta wait till augmented reality becomes a common thing like smartphones so you can use an adblocker software to hide ads to your eyes in public, haha.

I don’t have a Samsung but on my device:
Settings > Internet & Connectivity > VPN > Cogweel next to the VPN settings > There’s the option

On my device: Settings > Internet & Connectivity > VPN > Cogweel next to the VPN settings > There’s the option

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I use AdGuard and do the same with its built in Firewall feature for GBoard. The thing is, since I don’t use custom ROMs I can’t be sure that GBoard won’t just use Google Services for spying/tracking.

The first thing that pops up in my mind is your public IPv4. You see, in your home LAN every device uses the same public IPv4 to communicate in the internet. So if one device browses for something like an iPhone and you’re being tracked then those ad brokers deliver iPhone ads to this public IPv4 and every device behind this public IPv4 will see those ads. Nobody on the internet knows whether behind this public IPv4 is a single device or a LAN with many devices.

Open uBO settings > Filter lists > scroll down and click on import > a text box opens where you put the links of your custom filter lists (one per line) > apply changes

I use Pi-Hole and works great. I’ve heard about AdGuard and seems the same thing as PiHole

Only if you’re talking about AdGuard Home, then yes. When you talk about AdGuard you usually just mean the adblocker app which is something completely different.

I used all three of them. While AdGuard Home has some nice features that Pi-hole doesn’t, it in my experience has much more problems and has been unstable on some updates. So since you prefer stability for your DNS server I’d recommend Pi-hole over AdGuard Home.
NextDNS doesn’t need to be self-hosted because it’s a service on the internet. The disadvantage is that you are offered a list of blocklists from which you can choose but unlike Pi-hole or AdGuard Home you cannot add more lists. But they offer many lists so that’s not a big problem. If you need more than 300k queries a month you need to pay for their service. But since NextDNS is a service on the internet it means that you can use it on all of your devices no matter where you are.