“We questioned the assumption: Do you really need to track people to make money in advertising? And our answer is no,” Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, tells me. Part of the company’s success, he notes, is that a significant chunk of people want more privacy. A Pew Research Center study found that 81 percent of Americans think the downsides of data tracking outweigh the benefits.
“A lot of companies could be still pretty profitable if they chose to go this route,” Weinberg says. “They may be a little less profitable. But you know, it’s like—is that extra profit worth all this societal impact and problems? We don’t think so.