SwissCows has its own indexer and I believe they don't rely on any external search source like Bing. They should push for better marketing, less nationalism & better UI like duckduckgo and they would go pretty far imo, their results are often better than DDG

edit : my bad, actually they do use Bing in addition to their own crawler

I'm 100% like you feel. I also did a top uni for years, it was super stressful but I eventually managed. Now I just got a work at a tech company similar to Wacom. I thought okay, we all know how unethical are Google, FB & friends, but a company selling hardware accessories only, c'mon no way it should not be too evil... Well that Wacom story is cute in comparaison to what they do. Ofc they also log all apps used like wacom, but they are also implementing systems to analyse if you have health issues from your peripheral logs, analyse your emotions and stress level from microphones & cameras, facial recognition, eye gaze, etc.

I love technology and computer science but tech is so screwed up in terms of ethics.

I wish we'd see more people coming together that care about this (like truely care, not the #Tethics of the sillicon valley) to make some open and private alternatives to all this toxicity. But it is super hard to make things change.

I'll work in that direction in my free time, but I feel so alone. HN seems the only place people care a bit about that. Around me at uni or at work, the level of ethics and care for privacy is so low, it's depressing. It's not only that "rich boss" telling its employees to exploit people's data, it's also engineers themselves being happy collabo of this because they make huge salary working for those companies.