Ecosia is a Berlin-based search engine founded in December 2009 by Christian Kroll. It uses the revenue generated from search advertising to plant trees and fund climate action projects around the world. Ecosia has planted over 200 million trees across biodiversity hotspots and environmental crisis zones, making it one of the most impactful eco-friendly search alternatives.

Key Features

• Uses 80% of profits to plant trees and fund climate action
• Personal tree counter showing your search contribution
• Approximately 45 searches needed to plant one tree
• Powered by 100% renewable energy
• Carbon negative operations
• Monthly published financial reports and tree-planting receipts
• Web, image, video, and news search
• Building an independent European search index in partnership with Qwant

Privacy and Security

Ecosia takes a balanced approach to privacy. While it needs to share some data with its search partner Microsoft Bing to provide results, it does not create personal profiles from search history and anonymizes IP addresses within 7 days. Ecosia does not use external tracking tools and does not sell data to advertisers. As a German company, it fully complies with the GDPR.

Data Concerns

• IP addresses anonymized within 7 days
• No permanent storage of search data
• No personal profiling based on search history
• Some data shared with Microsoft Bing for search functionality
• European jurisdiction under German and EU privacy laws
• GDPR compliant with transparent data practices
• Company legally structured so it cannot be sold and profits cannot be extracted by owners