Fediverse

Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.

I have been sick a lot lately, so have had a lot of time on my hands. I don't have a search for Kagi or something. I wanted to use Kagi though, so I was disappointed when I realized that they want to continue this practice.

What are you implying with it being suspicious? In what way?

If Kagi pays a Russian company for a service, that company pays taxes to the Russian government.

Russia spends 32% of its budget on the Russian military. So for every dollar they get in taxes, one third is spent on the Russian military.

With a corporate tax rate of 20% that means 6.4% of Yandex profits go to the military. Since Kagi is mainly a paid service, I don't want my money to go to the Russian military, and I guess a lot of other people don't want this either.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/

The Russian people are not to blame, and I am sure a lot of great people work at Yandex and at different companies in Russia. That said, Russia chose to attack a peaceful democratic country, they are currently sanctioned by a lot of western countries in hopes that it will pressure their economy enough to force them to stop the war.

There isn't much we can do to stop the conflict besides hurting them economically and supporting Ukraine. If we continue to use Russian products and services then that does not work. Unfortunately this affects everyone in Russia.

I'm grateful someone mentioned it. Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they're based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.

Kagi defends itself by saying it's "only used 2% of the time" which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There's also the "but we've always done it like this" defence and something about "providing the best results" but neither are great arguments.