Tech companies don’t need to be greedy to make money

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Sometimes i really Incorrect.

In 2008, I heard about a trendy new search engine called Duck go, It is clear at a glance and predicts that it will die soon.After all, Google was still on the rise at the time, but the technology sector was overwhelmed by the wreckage of competitors search engineIt’s like a spaceship falling from the sky. How does a new one succeed? (Is it such a name?)

To make matters worse, DuckDuckGo’s business model keeps pace with the times. Its main feature is its commitment to privacy: its code will not track you at all. To be sure, this is a pleasant idea! But when all the other tech giants (Google and the rapidly rising Twitter and Facebook) are moving in the opposite direction to develop surveillance capitalist tools to collect as much data about you as possible, it seems like financial suicide. “Big data” is the shrinking slogan of technology conferences. The CEO of technology promises to feast on your every activity and personalize their services, which will bring epic win-win results. You will adjust search results (or social media feeds) to your interests; they can provide advertisers with laser-guided positioning. Hippies on DuckDuckGo? Lovely business model, folks. good luck.

For more than ten years, DuckDuckGo has produced a large amount of dough. It became profitable in 2014 and has maintained this status.

Last year, the company’s traffic more than doubled. It does this without creepy surveillance: all it does is use any keywords you type in the search bar (“best inkjet printer”, “Boston hotel”) to tailor ads for that search. This is called “contextual” positioning, and is different from the “behavioral” tracking of the secret police, which promotes advertising on many technology platforms and creates a huge archive of your online activities. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even keep your search information. Every time you load a search engine, you are a stranger.

“We questioned this assumption: Do you really need to track people to make money in advertising? Our answer is no.” DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told Gabriel Weinberg I. He pointed out that part of the company’s success is that a large number of people want more privacy. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 81% of Americans believe that data tracking does more harm than good.

Indeed, the success of DuckDuckGo makes it more obvious that many of Silicon Valley’s business arguments about data collection are completely wrong. They say they have to do this to produce compelling products: Personalizing their products helps to “attract” us to the greatest extent possible, thereby making money on advertising. But here is a high-tech company that avoids surveillance capitalism.It’s just practice Regular Capitalism.

So far, the drawbacks of hyper-personalization have been widely known, especially in the feeds of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube-filtering bubbles, polarization, and disorienting information. Social media is obviously not directly comparable to search, but when you see Weinberg’s success, it raises a question: Does all this customization and tracking have to be done first?

Weinberg said: “If you choose to go this way, many companies can still make money.” “Their profits may be less. But, do you know-is the additional benefit worth all these social impacts and problems? We don’t. Think.” Even some advertising buyers are questioning whether unlimited tracking is effective; a survey conducted by Digiday found that 45% of advertising executives did not get “no obvious benefits” from behavior tracking, and 23% of advertising Executors discovered their income decline.

The technological conflicts of the past few years have revealed the dangers of technology, and the tricky things exposed in them sometimes make you think, Dude, modern technology is a curse! However, in the success of DuckDuckGo, we can see that our dilemma stems more from technological obsolescence (only microprocessors, optical cables and codes), rather than from technical business models.

Getting rid of a monitoring-driven business model is no easy task. We can formulate public policies to make it more difficult to collect personal data, such as ” The age of surveillance capitalism, Suggest. Or, we can subdivide large technology monopolies into smaller companies that actually have to compete with each other, making them more likely to provide what customers really want, as Senator Elizabeth Warren (Elizabeth Warren) said. Words.

Regardless of the solution, legislators are required to take strong action against powerful companies, which is not inevitable. However, it is worth the effort. Today, creepy business models have become standardized in Silicon Valley. If we want more companies to follow the path of DuckDuckGo, then they need all the help they can get.


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