[Bradford] Search engine: StartPage

[John McLear]

Just in the name of disclosure I own a company that provides a similar service ( http://searchypants.com ) but for schools and another service that provides ad free search results ..  Imho startPage wont help you if you want to move away from Google (or leaking your data), sadly the best options are also massive tech giants.  Hopefully I wont get in trouble for this...    Sorry to join this convo late and if I missed anything..
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From: bradford-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk [bradford-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] on behalf of Alice Kaerast [alice at kaerast.info]
Sent: 05 July 2013 22:33
To: Brian A
Cc: BradLUG
Subject: Re: [Bradford] Search engine: StartPage

On the plus side they're hosting in Amsterdam, with routing (for me) going via Telehouse London directly to Leaseweb in Haarlem NL.  On the minus side they appear to have some relationship with Confluence Networks, who appear to be US-based but hide behind an Australian privacy protection service.

The NSA have had access to not just the companies explicitly named in the Prism leaks, but core routers around the world.  We know that this includes China, I haven't been following closely enough recently to know if it includes Europe.  Snowden claims that good security still can't be broken by the NSA, but we don't know if that includes SSL.  Startpage.com use SSL, but only 128-bit encryption, the certificate is only 2048 bit and it's not extended validation - plus it's issued by Go Daddy, a US company.

And what's this, https://startpage.com/do/adviewtrack.pl?a=5275&g=914&l=english_uk&anticache=290399&/filename.gif?  A transparent 1x1 gif called adviewtrack.pl<http://adviewtrack.pl>?  Multiple searches use the same a and g value, whilst the same search from a different browser increments a by one and g by 6.  The anticache value will be to stop proxies caching the file, thus ensuring they get logs every time a search is performed.

Panopticlick https://panopticlick.eff.org suggests that my browser fingerprint is unique among the 3,099,018 tested so far.  How much of that is stored against the adviewtrack logs?

Regards
Alice





On 5 July 2013 21:44, Brian A <bradlug at techchico.org.uk<mailto:bradlug at techchico.org.uk>> wrote:
Supposedly a  private Google search. So, the advantage of a Google search with the privacy of DuckDuckGo.

https://startpage.com/

Can be added to the Firefox drop-down search box.


Brian

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Mx Alice Kaerast
Devops supergirl, agile coach, corporate sysadmin, optimisationeer
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