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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Kagi

I personally got a really bad feeling about Kagi after reading this thread on /г/privacy.

The first quote OP pulls might just be unfortunately phrased:

In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized... AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data...

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

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

The anonymity/privacy distinction they're drawing here is gross. I honestly do not care about whatever official privacy policies they have up on their website. Their whole business model is built on trust, and I can't trust Kagi when the CEO himself says something like this. I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

I'll quote in full (because it's, again, a really bad look for Kagi) this paragraph from a post (click for screenshots) by an ex-Kagi user who was active in the Discord sever:

And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than 100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?" He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine", his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service), or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government tried to force him to collect information about users are just brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.

But the second one is harder to dismiss:

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

According to the thread you linked, that statement is about payment processing, not about the privacy of what you searched for.

Indeed, as I said:

I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.

My point is that you don't have to collect this data in the first place. You don't have to "know everything" about your customers. VPNs have a working anonymous monetization model. Which matters all the more here because the CEO seemingly does not understand very basic GDPR laws and can't be trusted with personal information.

Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII.

But how, exactly, is Kagi determining which emails are "random" and which are personal? They can't possibly know this. And yet, as far as I can tell, Vlad has said this thing about emails multiple times online.

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