This fall, tech companies will try to push private browsing into the mainstream

By Max Willens

Back in the 2010s, protecting one’s privacy on the internet seemed like a priority for the tin foil hat set. This fall, some of the biggest tech companies in the world will be trying to push the concept further into the mainstream.

In September, Apple will launch a beta version of Apple Private Relay, a privacy feature that will prevent websites (and the trackers loaded onto their pages) from identifying who is viewing them; Neeva, a private, subscriber-supported search engine that does not allow any ads, will begin hunting for customers armed with $40 million it raised in a recent series B funding round; Firefox, which has nearly 200 million monthly active users, will continue to educate its user base about two privacy-focused consumer products of its own, including a VPN and a private relay product that emerged from beta at the end of last year.

These companies’ approaches to privacy differ, but they are all betting on the same thing: that a significant chunk of consumers — after years of reading about personal data hacks, irresponsible data sharing and surveillance capitalism — will decide to simply reject the tracking methods and systems that underpin modern digital advertising.

How big that chunk will be may be hard to guess. While digital privacy is discussed more now than it has been in the past, its stakes remain obscure to a significant percentage of internet users. But the simple fact that so many companies are placing these kinds of bets should give marketers pause as they move forward with their plans for life after third-party cookies.

“We’re seeing a change in the tech industry primarily because users have seen how these same companies have abused their data,” Al Smith, a fundraising director at the Tor Project, wrote in an email. The Tor Project, which boasts privacy online by encrypting traffic, is in the first year of a multi-year project to improve its browser’s speed and scalability. “Ultimately, we are happy to see the Tor Project’s vision and goals (and in some cases, the technology we originally developed) seeing wider adoption, but there is still a long way to go.”

While privacy-centric software has existed for years, it has been adopted mostly on the fringes of society. Stats published by the Tor Project suggest its user base has hovered around 2 million daily active users, worldwide, for the past four years. Downloads of the three most popular VPN apps — Norton, Super Unlimited Proxy and CyberGhost — are slightly more robust, but still imply that private browsing is an emerging user behavior: All three apps, combined, have been downloaded 13 million times over the previous year, according to Sensortower data.

And for private browsing to become more established, a critical mass of consumers needs to think they have a problem that needs solving. Up until quite recently, Americans weren’t there yet. Separate studies conducted in 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that small percentages of American consumers, less than …read more

Source:: Digiday