‘They’re primed’: DuckDuckGo wants to be ‘the easy button’ for privacy on the internet. Do internet users want one?

By Max Willens

This story is part of Digiday’s Masters of Uncertainty series, a look at people and companies at the center of media’s defining storylines. Find the rest here.

DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg has a track record of getting to the next big thing early.

Maybe too early.

In 2006, back when Facebook was a college curiosity that still hadn’t moved off campuses, Weinberg, a graduate of MIT, sold The Names Database, a kind of proto-social network whose tagline was “Making the World a Smaller place,” to Classmates.com for $10 million.

Weinberg used some of that money to bootstrap his current venture, DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused technology company which, after years of focusing on its search engine, started expanding beyond its core product last year. Instead of just being a privacy-first search engine or browser, Weinberg wants DuckDuckGo to become what Weinberg calls “the easy button” for privacy on the internet.

In July, it launched a beta version of Duckmail, a mail-forwarding product designed to give users some anonymity when they sign up for different services online. In November, DuckDuckGo launched a tracker blocker in private beta for Android users, which prevents third-party trackers inside mobile apps from sending data about users’ activity out to sometimes unknown parties.

Those two products are off to modest starts — more than 500,000 people are on Duckmail’s waitlist, and more than 200,000 users are on the waitlist for DuckDuckGo’s tracker blocker. But over time, DuckDuckGo wants to go even further. By Weinberg’s count, there are “about 20” areas of modern life that could be wrapped in a layer of privacy-enhancing technology, ranging from payments to chat to phone calls. DuckDuckGo won’t move into all of those — “In the aggregate, it’s too much for one company to do,” Weinberg said — but the company sees opportunities to provide that layer of anonymity and peace of mind on several fronts.

“We’re really trying to expand our offering to become more comprehensive,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg and the rest of DuckDuckGo waited a long time for a moment like this one to arrive. But now that it’s here, DuckDuckGo faces an unusual quandary. After years on the periphery, consumer privacy has barged into the center of the media conversation, thanks to intensifying competition between Apple, Google and Facebook, increased government scrutiny and growing consumer awareness. Private browser adoption has begun to perk up, and venture capital has flowed in as well, filling the coffers of both enterprise and consumer-facing startups.

Consumer mindsets have tilted toward privacy up too, but in an uneven way; a study conducted by Cheetah Digital this past spring found that slight majorities of consumers now find digital ad tactics such as retargeting “creepy,” rather than “cool,” but barely one fifth of consumers have switched from one digital service to another because of privacy features. That’s forcing DuckDuckGo to both hurry up AND wait: To keep pace as it builds a suite of services in a newly crowded field, while also waiting for more and more consumers to …read more

Source:: Digiday