this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I don't think that's (intentionally) deceptive, it seems like two people talking past each other... I've been frustrated with customer support at a lot of places, I don't take it to mean those places are bad though. Good customer support is expensive and hard.
Thanks for sharing though, I'll keep that in the back of my mind.
Edit: I'm also curious why you care if they serve you geolocated results? That might be part of what the support agent was confused by.
... also maybe tone it down a bit, I don't think that other guy was trying to bait you and get you all hyped up.
I want a search engine that does not use any location data whatsoever to manipulate results because I see it as an extremely problematic practice. For example, someone who lives in my area would be more likely to see agencies and interests that align with fascism, since this is a heavily fascist state.
This, and it doesn't seem like a big ask to have a search engine solely respond to deliberate input from the user, so I'm not sure why I need to defend searching for such a thing. The agent could have simply disclosed that they do use locational data to provide their services, and I would have moved on. Instead, he tried to dodge the question. Not only that, but he became very pedantic about what constitutes a "search." In my interpretation, any widgets or any results whatsoever that use locational data would fall under this umbrella. It is needlessly pedantic to claim that it is something else entirely, since as you can see it was presented to me in response to my entering a keyword, a keyword which I might add did not request a widget at all.
While I feel like that in this case it is a non-problem, I could see while someone would like the ability to de-localize search results. Also agree on the rude aspect, thats just unworthy of such a civil discussion.