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Under "How Does It Work?": Every single search request from our website and extension is encrypted locally on the client and proxied through our service, stripp
by shuntress 6y ago
Under "How Does It Work?": Every single search request from our website and extension is encrypted locally on the client and proxied through our service, stripping away your public IP address ensuring that only the search provider is able to decrypt and see your query without any knowledge of who you are.
This is vague. It seems like it just means: "we have a TLS certificate and will be a proxy between you and Google"
- threwawasy1228 6y agoThat is what the authors stated means in practice, so your assessment is correct. This seems trivial, like I can just use an onion router for this.
- rasengan 6y agoIt's a bit different, since if you only use a TLS certificate, you'd still be able to see the query. That said, I agree, you could absolutely do the same with an onion router. This simply provides the benefit without having to do so.
- threwawasy1228 6y agoI was being a bit harsh offhandedly. If I was making a full assessment of the product I would say that it has a market. You can't really do what I'm talking about with the tor onion router, because google blocks tons of tor traffic from accessing its services and wont even let you do a captcha cloudflare-style a lot of the time. As someone who uses tor everyday, you basically can't get any higher quality general purpose search than duckduckgo or searx to actually load over onion routing. If you position yourself in such a way that your results engine returns queries on par with those two (or preferably better) you will have a rock solid product in your hands.
- rasengan 6y agoThank you so much for the comments! I totally agree with you!
- rasengan 6y agoGreat question! It's a bit more than that -- the search query is encrypted client-side. This means that the private.sh search proxy cannot see what the query is. Then, the query is delivered to the search engine. The search engine does not know the IP origin of the search query. This means that the search query and the identity of the searcher is decoupled, providing significantly more privacy. Hope this is clear!
- shuntress 6y agoThanks for the response. Is this client side encryption the same regular TLS encryption that I would normally (no proxy involved) send to the search engine or is there some kind of buy-in from the search engine to handle it a different way?
- rasengan 6y agoGreat question! It requires the search provider to utilize NaCl to decrypt (requires buy-in from the engine).
- ajconway 6y agoIs there a difference between private.sh and using a VPN?