| I've been playing with the Epic browser for some time now, and think it might be the closest thing we have to a completely private. Or maybe the closest browser we have for zero-basing what we might want out of a browser that's truly and fully ours, personally. And by zero I mean not just as a place to start, but as a browser with all kinds of stuff privacy-risking stuff stripped out. History, for example, leaving no tracks for others (or even yourself) to track.
A new version has just come out, and with it is this message, followed by a "I've got it. Close the message" button:
Please note to provide more flexibility some key Epic Functionality such as our built-in VPN / encrypted proxy and AdBlock are user-controlled now and should be added via the Epic Extension store.
True, free private search on a large scale is impossible to offer at present. We have tried for years now to obtain another private search partnership since Google annulled ours, but it simply isn’t possible. It’s cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars (even with the donations from thousands of you) over the past few years to keep Epic going. The expense is so great at our scale we couldn’t afford to launch our mobile browsers even though they've been ready and are fantastic. Epic protects hundreds of thousands of people around the world everyday. Our encrypted proxy/VPN is powered by hundreds of servers in eight different countries. To keep Epic an ongoing project, we had to become sustainable via our search options. Epic will now have two search options: free search by Yahoo & paid private search via EpicSearch.in.
When you use the default Yahoo-powered search in Epic, you’ll get better search results and support our mission including more frequent releases and hundreds more servers for our encrypted proxy/VPN. All searches sent to Yahoo are encrypted for your privacy and security. According to their requirements, Yahoo search does bypass both our proxy and adblock. Upon ad click in Yahoo search, the proxy and adblock remain disabled for several seconds. Their goal is to insure the integrity of their search ad marketplace. Due to their policies, a few other Yahoo sites including Techcrunch, Engadget, Autoblog, HuffPo and AOL bypass our adblock. No other sites bypass our adblock or proxy so Epic works almost entirely as it always has except in respect to the Yahoo sites.
We believe it is impossible at present to offer honest, free private search. We‘ve received many requests to support so-called private search engines such as Startpage, DuckDuckGo and others. To our knowledge there are no exceptions to Google/Bing mandates to share a user’s IP address and or location both to retrieve search ads and upon search ad click. It is misleading to claim to be private if you’re sharing your users’ data with Google/Bing. Despite multiple requests, they refuse to explain to us how they work.
EpicSearch sends only your search query to a third-party to retrieve search results, never any IP or other personal information. It continues to be the only reasonably true, private, search engine in the world. To sustain it and keep it ad-free, we will soon charge a nominal $2 a month fee. All Epic users can use built-in Yahoo search for free.
Thank you for your support of Epic. You’ve kept us going as well as helped change the entire tech industry focus. When Epic launched over five years ago, the vast majority of people in technology laughed at us saying nobody cares about privacy. Today, no one is laughing. Companies like Apple have launched massive hundred million dollar ad campaigns around privacy (more marketing than truth in the case of the iPhone -- this changes with the upcoming Epic for iOS launch :-). We’re thrilled to now be on a sustainable path to soon serve millions of users everyday. Privacy is serious and it matters. This is Epic!
As you know (even moreso with this message), we are proud of our mission and committed to transparency about how Epic works. My email address has always been public in that respect, one of the few among technology company founders. Epic is not just my browser. Epic is your browser. It's our browser. Please share your thoughts and questions with me directly as always, alok at hiddenreflex dot com.
A lot to parse and interpret there. I'm interested to hear what others here think.
One interesting note: I've found that some paywalls don't know what to do with Epic, so the site lets you read some paywalled stuff in Epic that you can't see with one of the more familiar browsers, without paying. Not sure what that's about, technically, but there it is. |