Ecosia is like DuckDuckGo with regard to privacy but all profits are used to plant trees (45.7 million so far). This makes it very appealing to eco-friendly web users. It also uses Bing rather than Google, which makes it appealing to people who are trying to avoid the latter.
I was able to add it to Brave via their Chrome extension. However, having it as one of the built-in options might help make Brave more attractive to eco-friendly and/or anti-Google users.
Although Brave strips out adverts, which is theoretically going to affect the business model of search engines, Ecosia accepts use of ad blockers as they still generate income based on overall number of users. That said, I have allowed adverts and it seems to be working fine on Brave.
ECOSIA PRIVACY POLICY
We only collect the data we absolutely need and do so with a self-hosted, secure and encrypted in-house analytics system.
We do not, and never will, share or sell any data we collect ourselves with any third party. Also, no third party that is not directly involved in answering your search request will ever have access to your search data.
For all data we collect ourselves, we take data protection very seriously and take many steps to ensure it is safe and anonymous. For example:
- We remove parts of the IP address when we store it so they become anonymous. For example 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX
- We do not use unique event fingerprinting
- We send all data collected from Ecosia services over an SSL-secured connection
- We store all analytics data in an highly encrypted database
- We only keep fully anonymised search data after 7 days
If you have “Do Not Track” enabled in your browser settings we do not collect any analytics data. Most other websites ignore this setting - we think users should have a choice.
We only allow connections to our search engine over a secured SSL/HTTPS connection. This way no one between you and Ecosia can secretly listen in on your searches. We use Digicert, one of the largest and most trusted SSL certificate authorities, to generate and manage our SSL certificates.
Ecosia’s servers are located around the world in order to provide a fast response no matter where you are. However, when you perform a search on Ecosia, your request will generally be routed to the server that is geographically nearest to you. That means, for example, if you are located in Germany your search traffic will remain within Germany and will fall under strict German privacy regulations.