Ecosia – A search engine that plants trees

Ecosia starts their privacy policy with, "We protect your privacy." ...but when you dig in, they: 1. Use Facebook for "conversion tracking". 2. May collect messages, photos, calendar information if you're using the app. 3. Hold on to personally identifiable information for upto 7 days post which they (pseudo)anonymize it to store it indefinitely. Now, without more information on how they do so, I'm not sure I'd trust the effectiveness of their anonymization, given they may store logs (and other…

I was investigating massive reforestation as a means of reducing greenhouse gases a few days ago. I stumbled upon this hyper-dense technique called the Miyawaki method [1]. Sounds like it's resource-intensive upfront but might be self-sustaining after that. The guy mentioned in [1] has open-sourced the methodology here [2]. [1]: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real... [2]: https://www.afforestt.com/methodology

I've recently come across Ecosia, a non-profit search engine that uses its profits to tackle climate change. They focus on reforestation and other environmental initiatives, and they publish monthly financial reports for full transparency on how the money is used. This got me thinking: why aren't there more companies like Ecosia? Their model seems incredibly impactful and straightforward. Given the current climate crisis and the increasing consumer demand for socially responsible businesses, one would think that…

Wow, this looks like a very noble effort. If they can offer privacy like DDG does, this will replace my default search engine. And the results seem decent too.