On celebrating World Environment Day, the Universitat Politècnica de València announces that the default search engine on the computers of the administration and services staff will be Ecosia—one more step towards the sustainability of the UPV.
The rest of the university community is invited to use it through the configuration instructions available at https://www.upv.es/doc/Ecosia.
Ecosia takes special care of privacy: it does not create user profiles or sell data to advertisers, and searches are always encrypted using SSL. The default configuration is, however, reversible, and the user can finally choose which search engine to use (see link above).
Ecosia is an Internet search engine that fights the climate crisis by planting trees. It is a B-corp company with a negative carbon footprint, which donates approximately 80% of its revenues to different non-profit organizations around the world related to reforestation. Several European and American universities have joined the campaign ‘Ecosia on Campus’, and the UPV has joined it as of today.
This action originates from a request from the university community and has been developed by ASIC, which will attend to technical queries in this regard.