>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
Privacy Pass would decouple each search from the account. I think it’s okay to have as an opt-in thing. But private payments should be the default IMO.
I see. I mispoke with "privacy pass" although it's similar. I meant like a one time break between your payment and account for regular accounts underneath the option to use privacy pass.
I think we’re broadly in agreement: the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better.
It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).
Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)
While they don't offer anonymous/private payments, you can use PrivacyPass no matter how you pay for Kagi. So, yes, the fact that you have an account will be known to anyone with access to their subscriber data, but what you search for will not be tied to that identity.
