Is /e/OS a smartphone safe-space?
Secure smartphone operating system Eeyos (/e/OS) has added private search engine Mojeek to its portfolio of defensive options, for those who want to seach without being talked. The two vendors are part of a new privacy respecting sector aiming to, as one campaign group proclaims, ReclaimTheNet for the public.
The respective founders of /e/OS and Mojeek, Gaël Duval and Marc Smith, said they are catering to growing concern about privacy invasions by technology companies. The ReclaimTheNet movement has created a new sub-sector of service providers that offer the option to search online without being tracked.
“Just as organic food became real in the 2000s,” /e/OS founder Gaël Duval, “now we are pioneering this emerging and super dynamic fair-IT market.” There is a business logic to the privacy protection, according to Duval, because respecting privacy creates trust and that is the best foundation for sustainability.
The inventors describe /e/OS as a ‘deGoogled mobile operating system’ which goes to great lengths to remove all of the unnecessary and privacy-invasive aspects of Google’s de facto mobile platform on Android phones. Duval said his team have made the move to privacy as simple as possible for the end-user. In most similar operating systems this is impossible for the majority of non-technical users, who won’t know how to unlock and re-flash their previously Android-running device.
Mojeek was started in 2004 but the increasing awareness of the privacy issue convinced tech veteran Colin Hayhurst that this is a company whose time has come and he joined as CEO in 2020. Mojeek now has a web search index of over 6.5 billion webpages. After becoming the first ever private search engine Mojeek has grown sustainably with funds from private investors who believe in its aims, it said in a release.
There is a compelling case for privacy protecting systems and people should be able to search without being stalked or having their data harvested, according to Mojeek CEO Colin Hayhurst, CEO of Mojeek. “Our searches can be customised without any cookies,” said Hayhurst, “To provide that we built our search infrastructure, index and algorithms from the ground-up. Our mobile users want a platform from an entity that practices similar principles and is an alternative to Google, Apple and Huawei.”
However the new supply stream has been muddied by some alternative search engines that are not alternative at all and continue to source results from either Google or Microsoft’s Bing. Mojeek’s founder said it is a non-tracking search engine that is ‘truly and transparently independent’. Ease of use is another problem dogging those seeking privacy. However the collaborators claim that users can buy Murena smartphones, including their own phone Murena One, with the /e/OS operating system already running on them out of the box.
The latest update of /e/OS 1.8, Mojeek search engine now can be found among the list of other privacy search options in the /e/OS browser. Those with smartphones running /e/OS can change the default search engine, in the Browser app, by clicking on 3 dots button in the top right corner then navigating to Settings where should opt for the Search engine specification.