Just in time for all the searchable information to be completely drowned out by low quality AI content.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
226 points (97.9% liked)
Privacy
30753 readers
901 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Thank God I did all my searching before this happened.
did you also make hard copies of everything you found?
Dang it! No! brb
It's already drowned out by low quality SEO spam, so no difference
This is my nightmare
Let’s take a moment and acknowledge that it was never hard to make searches private.
It’s just that doing that requires trusting a company not to fuck with you behind the scenes and sell you out, and ensuring that doesn’t happen is fucking hard
requires trusting a company not to fuck with you behind the scenes
The point of this cryptography is that you don't have to trust the company implementing it not to do that, as long as you trust the software doing the retrieval.
Unless you do it all yourself, it will never be trustless.
Just like your favorite phone app, in the end you will have to trust the actual code, and you will have to trust that the actual app on your actual phone is from the actual source they claim. Do you feel lucky?
Actually, to make it with cryptographic guarantees is pretty hard... I know of at least one university professor in the PET (Privacy Enhancing Technologies)/cryptography space who spent quite some time on his startup to develop such a search engine. In the end it all fell apart because of one the mathematical assumptions being unprovable. This is just one example but I guess it illustrates pretty well why we've yet to see a cryptographically secure/private search engine as a product!
Most Linux package managers sync the list of all packages they can download. I wonder if some sort of system like that can be used to federate web searching.
So we all just have a copy of the internet and then we can grep for things we are interested in ... I'm actually not super against this.
The storage requirements might be ever so slightly prohibitive.