Comment by yreg
7 months ago
I've read the first third of the article and I didn't get what's the author's problem with Kagi. What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts.
Then I scrolled through the rest of it and read the very last screenshot. That one looks pretty bad.
> people who really need anonymity are very rare. probably less than a 100 in the entire world. definitely not typical Kagi users
> unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
- Kagi CEO
> What do they care how many employees Kagi has or how much they spend on t-shirts.
Spending a third of your round on t-shirt manufacturing equipment is possibly not the best sign of the focused leadership that will bring your company success in a difficult market.
True, but what do I as a customer care? It's not like I'm building some business on their APIs or anything.
If they go down, I will switch to another search engine… no need to do so preemptively from my PoV.
Because "going down" doesn't necessarily mean _shutting_ down-- it could be a sale as well. Considering the stated attitude towards privacy, that should worry you if privacy is your concern.
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It you want to know when Evernote went downhill, it’s precisely the moment they started selling backpacks.
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Kagi CEO here.
I'd concede that it was a bad choice of words but also the screenshot was taken out of context. What I meant to say is that anonymity and privacy are two different things and that most people really need just their privacy respected, not be truly anonymous in life.
I also had a narrow view back then of what people considered by anonymity (for example considering VPNs as something giving them anonymity online).
Your grasp of personal information management under GDPR seems to be lacking, particularly regarding the roles and responsibilities of data controllers and what personal information are under GDPR. If you're operating within this jurisdiction, I would strongly recommend consulting with a GDPR expert. Non-compliance can lead to significant fines. Additionally, if this user were located in Europe, and he already sounds salty, were to report this to a privacy watchdog, there's a high likelihood it could result in a penalty. It might be beneficial to revisit GDPR guidelines to ensure compliance and avoid such risks.
You are correct and my confidence at the time came from the fact that we are not in the business of selling user data, do not collect it or ever need it so GDPR was not affecting us (in my mind).
I had no business discussing sophisticated policy matters on a public Discord, and yet I did it in good faith open to learning something new like it happened many times on our Discord. People do this all the time. The difference is when a CEO of a company does it, it has extra weight and this is why CEOs usually do not discuss these things with users. Lesson learned.
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I really don't want to use a VPN and a fake e-mail address with Kagi to get the kind of anonymity that DDG at least claims to offer.
[It would also be selling point to offer at least GDPR levels of privacy to everyone -- embrace it and do it right for the EU and don't fuck over people in the rest of the world just because you aren't required to do it here]
> unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
Christians can be labeled criminals in China. Young women try to get a 1st trimester abortion in Texas.
What the hell is he talking about? Anyone with even a basic understanding of human liberty and dignity knows anonymity and free speech are bedrocks. Especially disturbing coming from someone trying to run a search engine which can collect very detailed and targeted information from users via their search history!
I have been a proponent of kagi from near inception, and have interacted with Vlad by email as well as Discord, including getting change/feature made. The core search product was (for the longest time*) a breath of fresh air, as were these interactions**.
That "criminals" comment flipped my advocacy off like a light switch, for all the reasons described here in this thread. Perhaps it will get walked back.
* Lately, the results seem more Bing-like, and I've even had to !g things for the first time in a year to find a non-spam result. The core product has to be 10x for people to advocate and people to switch, not just more of the same or slightly better.
** Although, I couldn't convince him to make a team plan that would effectively let me pay full price (pro or ultimate) per employee for everyone registering from a domain. I cannot fathom why he wouldn't let a company pay him for double or triple digit employees, it's free money. Plus, those employees that use it for free at the office, will get frustrated at home, and buy the family option and tell their friends... Refusing to let me cover my employee base is a weird flex for someone still counting subscribers trying to get to 25,000.
Definition of “criminal” can change depending on perspective. A journalist is a criminal from a perspective of an authoritarian government.
It can also change after an election, and the impact can be retroactive.
Vlad needs to walk that "criminal" comment WAY the hell back.
He's right though (or at least I agree with him).
Full anonymity is hard to achieve.
Kagi is aiming for more privacy, I.e. a search engine and browser that doesn't track your habits or sell them to data brokers to identify you. Kagi does that very well.
Anonymity should be the default. I don't have any right to come peeking into your windows, or to tap your phone, even if there's a market for whatever I discover. The same should be true for online activity.
And his comment about needing privacy? Name one person that needs privacy while taking a shit. Just because your desire for privacy doesn't rise to the level of need, that doesn't make it any less valid.
Eh, a founder that effectively says 'we don't care if we give away the identity of our users if they are criminals' is not totally in line with my definition of an organization focused on privacy.
At least not a definition of privacy I really care about.
It's very Mark Zuckerberg 2004.
I definitely agree that this comment was extremely problematic.
> unless they are criminals, in which case we don't care they don't have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
People helping other people escape slavery were criminals.
Those who have "nothing to hide" still close their curtains at night and shut the door to the bathroom when on the toilet.
Granting and fiercely protecting privacy is a simple matter of respect for your fellow human beings. Doing so also has the side effect of slowing descents into various forms of totalitarianism.
>Whenever there’s a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy.
— Eric Schmidt, 2013
Ouch. I have been on the fence about paying for Kagi for some time now. Will definitely not touch any project presided over by someone with such a viewpoint.
Why do you care about a viewpoint of CEO if the product is good?
he should run his discord posts through a LLM for an unbiased summary of who he is as a person.
For me, and probably a lot of other people who moved from other search engines, long-term viability of Kagi is important - heck, that's the reason I've decided it's worth paying some money for search. Given that, I'd expect them to be very frugal with their spendings. Burning money on T-shirts, on another Browser, AI "improvements", Kagi Email (wtf? first time I've heard of it) show that they have incredibly startupy mindset, and will end up like every other company that takes VC money - bloated, money focused and deaf to their community.
Every entrepreneur obsesses about some competitor or some business model.
You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.
If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind. Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth about product market fit.
Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom" experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of the growth plan.