Is Ecosia a Scam?

By Luke Escoto

What is Ecosia?

Ecosia is a search engine based in Berlin, Germany. Ecosia considers itself a social business, claiming to be CO₂-negative, supporting full financial transparency, and protecting the privacy of its users. Ecosia is B Lab certified, meeting its standards of accountability, sustainability, and performance.

Co2-negative: this title used to describe a business that takes away more carbon dioxide than what they make every year.

How do they plant trees?

They get the money to plant the trees through the ad revenue they get. So far they have planted about over 150 million trees!

Is Ecosia a scam?

Ecosia is a certified B-corp

A B-corp is defined as a for-profit corporation that has been certified by B Lab, which is a non-profit company that measures a company's social and environmental performance against the standards in the online B Impact Assessment. There are over 4,000 Certified B Corps in 77 countries across 153 different industries.

Do they steal your search history?

They don't even save any personal data, so they aren't able to steal data if they wanted to. There are other sources that claim that they are browser-hijackers, but their evidence for this can also be evidence to go against other search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.