swisscows is a bit sketchy

i recently came across swisscows. it presents itself as a anonymous search engine from switzerland. after a bit of research i found several reddit posts that suggests that its a pretty good search engine, aswell as a privacy respecting and non-tracking company.

however things start to fall apart pretty quickly. they state that they have no tracking on their start page. yet in their privacy policy they state that they log data such as the ip addres, the user agent (without unique or potentially identifiable components), the search query as well as the search region settings. also, if you're using the free tier of the search engine, there might be ads and those ads are served from microsoft and google. when these ads are loaded, personal data is automatically being sent to those companies. this doesn't seem very non-tracking for me.

there are several reviews on trustpilot that suggest that this company is very sketchy too. vpn services are sourced from google and microsoft, company shares cannot be sold, gay actors are being censored, poor customer support and poor customer support again. the latter two reviews are about 4 years appart and still describe the same issue; nobody awnsers the phone and emails wont get responded to.

as much as i would want to like swisscows and all of their services, this whole company is very sketchy and i dont think that anyone should trust them. sure, they are located in switzerland and need to follow the dsg (federal act on data protection), but keep in mind that there were larger companies that were even more sketchy and still continued exist.