This is a fascinating read. There’s the story of how Gabriel Weinberg got started. And the story of how he figured out his core mission, that of privacy.
One particular highlight that struck me:
It was 2011 when Gabriel Weinberg started to experiment off-line advertising with a billboard, which said “Google tracks you. We don’t.”
According to Wired, that campaign cost was $7,000 for four weeks, and it started “in tech-heavy SOMA district, along the highway dumping cars off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco.”
This is not literature, but there’s lots of detail, and a terrific underdog story.
I’ll be interested in seeing how DDG plays out over the next decade, compared to Google. Will people grow more conscientious about their privacy or surrender to familiarity and convenience? Ideally, I’d love to see Alphabet (Google) reined-in from its dependence on ad revenue and adopt a ‘customer-first’ policy that mitigates against privacy leakages, but then again I also hope heroin users can overcome their addiction. Sadly, both are never gonna happen.
For those of us smart enough to see the writing on the wall, DDG is the way to go if you want to search incognito.
Consider the Bill of Rights, thought up by some enlightened people who realized that unless you specifically provide in law for the rights of individuals, those “rights,” even if those which appear common-sensical, will inexorably be eroded to nothingness through a variety of mechanisms.
Although I use and like Duck Duck Go, I don’t think the problems of the internet era, privacy among others, can be solved in any way but through principled, intelligent, centralized regulation.
I think we need a Bill of Rights for the internet age.