I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for weather there, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.

I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you’re actually searching for.

I support anonymous telemetry collected by a small non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.

That would be a terrible AI.

It’s technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.

Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that’s independent of for-/non-profit status.

From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.

We are making some of the same mistakes as other countries do like make it more and more and more illegal instead of loosening some of the drug laws.

That’s exactly why she says the Netherlands risks becoming a narco-state. Well, that, and other countries doing the same:

The challenges we now face in the Netherlands are not an indictment of our liberal drug policy. Rather the opposite. Take the Dutch government’s approach to MDMA, influenced by the global war on drugs, which has become increasingly repressive since the late 1980s and early 90s. Under international pressure, the Netherlands placed MDMA, which is known as a party drug and perceived as relatively harmless, under the Opium Act in 1988, classifying it as a hard drug. This shift inadvertently contributed to the profitability of illegal MDMA production and created a lucrative business model for criminal organisations, as evidenced by the estimated €18.9bn street value of annual ecstasy production in the Netherlands. This experience reveals how efforts to align with global drug prohibition trends can have counterproductive outcomes.

What the Netherlands’ problems reveal is the need for a global shift in the current approach. It’s not a matter of retracting our user-centred policy, but rather advocating for international recognition that the war on drugs is counterproductive.

That’s why the article itself adds the “major browser” qualification.