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It's worth noting that the "trees planted" counter is basically an estimate as to how much ad revenue on average is generated from a user based on their number of searches. If you block ads at all, you're probably not contributing to their revenue at all, thus planting nothing.
I like the idea, but don't see it as worth sacrificing privacy or allowing ads. Tossing a few bucks every now and then to a charity might be a better option for some.
It's great that the option exists for those that don't care about their digital footprint and also want to just passively contribute without "spending" a cent. Not for everyone for sure.
I was under the impression that they anonymized your search results within a week. How is that sacrificing privacy?
You’re right, your IP is anonymized after 1 week. Their privacy policy seems great to me. I just turn off uBlock origin for Ecosia and don’t mind quickly scrolling past a couple of ads at the top of results.
It’s my firefox default search and I rack up a ton of trees for doing many quick and basic searches. If I ever need a more complex search, I use a different site. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing commitment.
https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/33-how-does-ecosia-make-money
Ecosia only gets money from ads if you click on a link, so if you quickly scroll past them all the time you might as well leave uBO on.
They also said you shouldn't just click on ads randomly, it won't help.
They say
Their answers there do make it sound like clicks are necessary, but it’s my understanding that each search query also has a fixed rate. Advertisers pay for both clicks and impressions. That’s why everyone gets a tree counter that goes up for just searching. Granted it’s a very small earning for impressions, which is why it takes ~50 searches for a single tree.
Because there are search engines out there who don't commit your IP/search terms to disk at all for any length of time. Search engines like Startpage, Brave Search, and DDG. Users of those would be sacrificing privacy to use Ecosia.
The money used to plant trees also comes from somewhere, namely advertising. It's fair to assume most web-based advertisers are privacy-hostile and once you click ads served to you from Ecosia to actually generate them revenue, you are then directed to the advertiser's site and subject to their privacy policy, which is likely a lot more loose. Allowing Ecosia's ads through your filters is sacrificing privacy.
The Privacy Policy you linked also talks vaguely about working with and providing "metadata" and such to "third party providers" for a variety of uses, with apparently optional "personalization" and whatnot.
I don't think their privacy policy is a complete disaster when you compare it to mainstream search engines like Google or Bing directly, which they go to great lengths to point out in their own policy with the "hey, we're not as bad as the other guy!" rhetoric. But there are more private search options out there, hence my earlier post's allusion to sacrificing privacy.
Which charities specifically do this kind of stuff?
I really like Mossy Earth. They also do ecosystem restoration projects and you get access to all their survey's and video updates of their progress.
Plant trees? You can check out https://teamtrees.org/
https://www.treedom.net/ does it