Jackoamon

You mean the pointless political charade to try and make trump look good as he proceeds to further enable and promote the genocide?

I would say the real issue is transparency. If Honey made it clear that their product overwrote the affiliate links referer, didn’t actually find the best deals (despite advertising that exact thing), and then paid influencers to advertise their product that also steals from them, then this wouldn’t be as much of a big deal if at all. Though they also probably wouldn’t be a successful business, hence why many consider it a scam.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

They use many sources, including other search engines and specific websites, but also claim to use two of their own indexes.

Can’t say much in regards to perplexity, but I find kagi’s index to be quite nice. Especially if you find fortune forum posts helpful (which I do as a software dev). It’s paid only, so there’s no advertising incentive to the company and also a ton of configuration. I search a lot, so I went with the 10 dollar plan. 5 bucks gets you 300 searches a month, 10 is unlimited plus access to their LLM which documents information sources like perplexity.

Personally, I found perplexity to be quite annoying with the more ai focused UI and trying to learn your interests. Kagi is a search engine first plus some other features they’re developing.

Doesn’t Israel have required military service?

They likely buy leaked data that would include things like your full name and email, perhaps an address. Even if an address isn’t there, legal data brokers often have your address for a small payment anyways. From there they likely use something like Google Street view.

On the android front, if you don’t mind using a pixel phone then Graphene OS would be worth checking out. It’s a foss non rooted alternative to base android with a focus on privacy and security. The no root requirement means a good amount of apps like banking work properly on it. It vastly expands the app permission system and removes the special privileges to Google system apps, allowing you to remove it or limit them. It also supports sandboxing of the play store and multiple profiles so you can effectively quarantine Google requiring apps.

There’s a huge amount variety between the alternative sbc providers, but I’m general:

• some are simply designed not to have various bits of hardware like the camera 22 pin connector.
• some fail to conform to the pis pin out or footprint, so hats won’t be compatible
• more commonly, documentation and support is so poor that extensive dev/Linux experience is required to get existing hardware to work

All of this makes it difficult to utilize alternatives without conducting considerable research into many different ones.