Hello,
This is my first time typing a post on Privacy Guides so I am not familiar with how people usually write them
i’ve been using startpage’s anonymous search for a few years now, whose purpose is to change the way you appear to a website (user-agent, IP, DNS, etc) and they “rewrite” a website’s JavaScript to protect a user’s privacy. You only have to click a mask icon that is next to the website’s link on the search engine.
but around spring of this year, something very weird happened: first, every time I open a page on anonymous search it says that Anonymous search is on beta (which is very weird since it’s been years that anonymous search exists, and not on beta if i remember it correctly). But most importantly, when i open websites such as Reddit, it does not only connect to the Startpage proxy, it also connect to some reddit servers directly according to umatrix (i.e. redditmedia.com), and from what i remember in the past it only connected to startpage itself.
Many websites also totally break even though they worked in the past (i am talking about websites that did not change)
i am aware that startpage’s anonymous search has never been something that magically makes someone anonymous and that startpage has many downsides and is far from being perfect but my subjective preference is to trust them more than i trust directly clicking on websites like google or microsoft. I also know that there are web browsers like Librewolf who seriously change your device’s attributes but i don’t use them out of convenience because it is useless without a VPN and I only rarely use VPNs.
Is this normal or is it seriously not working well?