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Sometimes I really am oker.
In 2008 I came across a funky new search engine called DuckDuckGo, took a look and announced that he would die a quick death. After all, then Google was on the rise and the tech areas were littered with opponent’s waste search engines, like ships thrown from the sky. How could a new one be successful? (And with a name like that?)
Worst of all, DuckDuckGo’s business model was going against the flow. His main feature was his commitment to privacy: his code would not track you at all. Great idea, for sure! But it seemed like financial suicide when all the other tech giants — Google and the rising Twitter and Facebook — were running in the opposite direction to gather as much data about you as possible to build capitalist surveillance tools. “Big Data” was the turtle neck of tech congresses and the CEOs of technology promised that partying in all your activities and customizing their services would create an epic win and gain. You would get search results (or social media feeds) tailored to your interests; they can offer advertisers laser targeting. Those hippies at DuckDuckGo? Adorable business model, folks. Good luck.
After more than a decade, DuckDuckGo has made boat dough. It became profitable in 2014 and has remained that way.
Last year, the company’s traffic doubled. He has done it without fear: He uses any keywords written in the search bar: “best inkjet printer,” “Boston hotels” – to personalize the ad for that search. Known as “contextual” targeting, it tracks the “behavior” of secret police, which encourages advertising on many technology platforms and creates a mammoth dose of your online activity. DuckDuckGo also does not store your search information. Every time you load a search engine, you are a stranger.
“We challenged that hypothesis: Do you really need to track people to make money in advertising? And that’s not our answer,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, told me. It’s part of the company’s success, he noted, that a significant number of people want more privacy. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of Americans believe that the disadvantages of data tracking outweigh the benefits.
In fact, the success of DuckDuckGo suggests, more terribly, that many of Silicon Valley’s business arguments about data collection are wrong. They say they have to do it to produce compelling products: customizing their merchandise helps us be “engaged,” and thus earns us advertising money. However, here is a technology company that avoided the practice of surveillance capitalism; practices regular capitalism.
By now, the downsides of hyperpersonalization are well known, especially in Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube feeds — filter bubbles, polarization, wild eye misinformation. Social media isn’t directly comparable to search, of course, but when you look at Weinberg’s success, a question arises: was all this personalization and tracking necessary first?
“A lot of companies could be quite profitable if they chose to go down this path,” says Weinberg. “They may be a little less profitable. You know, the question is: is more profit worth all this social impact and trouble? We don’t think so. ”Some ad buyers are also questioning whether endless monitoring works; according to a Digiday survey, 45 percent of ad executives didn’t see“ significant results ”from tracking behavior, and 23 percent had revenue decline.
The techlash of recent years has shed light on the harms of technology, and the wrong things it reveals sometimes make you think, Man, modern technology is a curse! But given the success of DuckDuckGo, our technological situation stems less from technology and technology business models, stemming from the mere existence of microprocessors, fiber optic cables, and code.
It will not be easy to get out of care-oriented business models. We could work on public policies to make it more difficult to collect personal data, says Shoshana Zuboff The era of capitalist surveillance, suggests. Or we could break big technology monopolies in smaller companies that need to compete with each other so that customers have a greater chance of offering what they really want, as Senator Elizabeth Warren says.
Both repairs require lawmakers to act forcefully against powerful companies, which is not given. It’s worth the push, though. Today’s tremendous business models have been standardized in Silicon Valley. If we want more companies to follow the path of DuckDuckGo, they need all the help they can get.
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