Tor's New Search Provider Built By Ex-Google And Ex-NSA Engineers

Anonymous Coward

in ask on 2015-04-29 10:24 (#823G)

The Tor project has decided to stop using the Startpage search engine and will be standardizing on the Disconnect Search Engine, a project that, in theory, uses VPN technology to permit you to use Google, Bing, and Yahoo search services without revealing your IP address or any personal information that would allow companies to build a profile using data revealed as you search. Disconnect was written by former Google and NSA engineers.

Sound like a good choice of technology? Not everyone is impressed. Though the Tor project has stated that Startpage was not happy with our traffic and showed sometimes CAPTCHAs. Disconnect on the other hand approached us with respect to search engine traffic and donated some money, a few choice comments from the article reveal that many users wonder whether money had anything to do with the change in technologies.

What prompted the change in search engine? Are we now getting paid to include disconnect as the default search engine?"

and

So what's next, Torproject? Keystroke logging for Amazon or another company? Partnering with Recorded Future or something like it? Is this what the project has come to now? But that "Disconnect" Search Engine site is so pretty. So nice and clean, WOW! It sort of reminds me of the polished DoD sites I have wandered through.

and

With this new "Search Engine", I feel like a rug is being pulled out from underneath me and damn it "that rug really tied the room together."

What say the |.ers?

Read Their Privacy Policy (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-04-30 05:32 (#83RJ)

https://disconnect.me/privacy

Disgusting.

Re: Read Their Privacy Policy (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-04-30 07:45 (#83YM)

I love how they "never collect your Personal Info, except when they do" and "never share your Personal Info (the one they didn't collect, remember?), except when they do"

Re: Read Their Privacy Policy (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2015-04-30 10:47 (#849X)

They are a business, after all. The days of people creating software because it's fun and useful aren't gone, but they've taken an arrow in the leg since the world of apps on mobile devices. Developers are trying to carve out niches that lead to big profits (a lot of them are, anyway), and this one smells of money.

Just noticed this is being posted everywhere (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2015-04-30 10:45 (#849C)

I just noticed a direct copy-paste of what was submitted to this pipe, in the comments of an unrelated article on slashdot about XP support. Had i known that, I would have potentially shitcanned this article, as it took one hell of a lot of work to bang into the shape of a coherent article.