I’ve been using MetaGer for a long time and have been very satisfied with it. So sad to see it go. Time to look for a new search engine.

Most of southeastern Europe uses Viber as the “default messaging app”, so it does vary by region.

Right, I think it only covers personal information: companies can only collect what they need to run their service, users can request to see their data etc. I don’t think it applies to comments and posts.

This might interest you. Tl;dr, engines recommended besides DDG, Brave and SearX are:

MetaGer, Mojeek, Swisscows, Qwant and YaCy

Yeah that was a disappointing moment. Though I think you can still use wired headphones with an adapter that connects them to USB-C.