brave search

[Martinligabue]

I think another good and private search engine to add to the default list might be search.brave.com

[Technetium1]

Web search, Goggles, Extra alternate snippets for AI, Rights to use data for AI inference, News, Videos, Images
(https://brave.com/search/api/)

Signing off rights to your queries to be used for AI inference doesn't feel very private at all. Especially when it's not directly mentioned in the same words in their ToS as far as I can find. Maybe as their Leo AI product rolls out more, they will update policy to say more about this data they harvest?

[dr460nf1r3]

Interesting. Didn't know about that yet 👀 How did you find it @Technetium1 ?

[Martinligabue]

he is referring to the free service "Data for AI" he linked, that will use the data for those services, (and since that's just the ad and not the actual tos it's not really clear what it's about), that's not the search engine.

According to Wikipedia, and the sources provided as reference for that sentences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Search

However, the user can allow the Brave browser to anonymously check Google for the same query.[

so that's opt-in, and

Brave Search implements some level of data collection only when users opt in through the Web Discovery Project (WDP).

also opt-in.

The only actual concern, afaik, might be

Brave Search is not yet open-source like Brave Browser

[Technetium1]

This AI functionality is on by default', how then is it opt-in? To me, opt-in that means functionality is off unless I decide I specifically and intentionally want to enable. I am admittedly in the USA, so maybe the rest of the world doesn't have this toggled? 😕

I would like to note a technicality of LLM functionality, especially in terms of their policy. Inference is the process of taking an input (user data in this case), and handing it to an LLM, in order to get probabilistic outcomes of the next most common tokens. At the moment they decide to summarize (when you decide to search), inference is happening on your data.

This notice is linked in that section of settings, which is thereby implicating their AI engine Leo.

Settings page: https://search.brave.com/settings

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I'm not concerned that they're not open source, though it would be much cooler if they were. I'm displeased that their privacy policy feels so lacking in terms of the LLM functionality which is enabled by default.

[Martinligabue]

I see, then I agree their tos are not really clear, thanks

[dr460nf1r3]

I wonder if there is a way to disable those by default, eg. by using specific URL parameters 👀

[Technetium1]

It's cookie based unfortunately:
summarizer=0; Path=/; Expires=Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT; Secure; SameSite=Lax

[dr460nf1r3]

I'm inclined to not add it then.