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Technology companies don’t have to be greedy to make money

Sometimes I really am wrong.

In 2008 I heard about a new search engine called DuckDuckGo, he glanced at it, and predicted that he would soon die. Other than that, at that point Google grew bigger and the technical fields were filled with the destruction of each other search engine, like stars thrown out of the sky. How can one do better? (Is a name like that?)

Too bad, the DuckDuckGo business type was rowing here. The important thing was to commit to the secrets: His number would never track you down. Good idea, for sure! But it seemed like an economic suicide where all the other superheroes — Google and Twitter and Facebook — are rushing elsewhere to create visual-capitalist tools to get more out of you. “Big Data” was a compelling text for tech conferences, and professional CEOs promised that having a party on all of your content — and changing their careers — would lead to great success. You can find customized search results (or online videos) tailored to your preferences; can give advertisers laser advertising. Those hippies at DuckDuckGo? A good example of business, people. Good luck.

For more than a decade, DuckDuckGo has been building a boat-filled boat. It became profitable in 2014 and has remained so.

Last year, the number of people in the company doubled. It does this without any supervision: All it does is use any keywords you choose in the search terms – “best printers,” “Boston hotels” – to change the search results. This is known as “tracking”, in contrast to the secret police tracking “behavior” that enhances advertising on a wide range of technologies and creates greater awareness of what you are doing online. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even store what you search for. Each time you turn on the search engine, you become a stranger.

“We doubted the idea: Do you really need to follow people to make advertising money? And our answer is no,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, tells me. One of the best things about the company, he says, is that most people want to be confidential. A Pew Research Center survey found that 81 percent of Americans think that the reduction in data tracking outweighs the benefits.

Indeed, the success of DuckDuckGo shows, with great sadness, that many of the ideas in the Silicon Valley business about data harvesting are wrong. They say they need to do this to make things better: Changing their products helps us to be “busy,” so we become more marketable. Yet there is a technology company that has avoided pursuing capitalism; it just does regular capitalism.

In the meantime, the decline in morale is well-known, especially in the Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds – filtering, splitting, disinfection of angry eyes. Medical goals aren’t exactly the same as hunting, obviously, but when you see Weinberg’s success, it raises the question: Were all these preferences and pursuits important in the first place?

“Most companies can be very profitable if they choose to follow this approach,” Weinberg said. “It can be a little overwhelming. But you know, it’s like – is the extra benefit worth it all? We do not think so. ”Even some consumers are skeptical about whether permanent follow-up will work; A survey conducted by Digiday showed that 45% of ad execs did not see “any profit” in tracking traffic, and 23% found that they had found decrease.

The growth of technology over the past few years has highlighted the deterioration of technology, and the things that are sometimes revealed make you think, Man, modern technology is a curse! But in the success of DuckDuckGo, one can see that our problem does not stem from technical expertise — from the presence of microprocessor, fiber-code cables, and code — rather than technical models.

It won’t be easy to deal with businesses that are run by people. We can make government ideas more difficult to harvest more, like Shoshana Zuboff, author The Age of Managing Capitalism, showing. Or we can break up big corporations into smaller companies that have to compete, enabling them to deliver what customers really want, as Senator Elizabeth Warren suggests.

Any plan requires lawmakers to take action against powerful, unsupported companies. It’s worth pushing, though. Modern business models have been relocated to Silicon Valley. If we want more companies to follow the DuckDuckGo method, they need all the help they can get.


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