"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."
How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.
I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.
Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.
It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me.
Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.
Grocery stores do not just use the data internally but also sell their Point of Sale data to third parties that analyze it and then sell their analysis to anyone willing to pay for it (mostly that is CPG companies). Point is: it isn't necessarily a direct benefit to the end customer.
I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is necessary to check out. My response is always, politely, "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a stranger how many children they have or what time they get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use that information!
I hope you realize that grocery stores track you in other ways than just your zip code or phone number [1]. You have a beacon in your pocket that is always searching for SSIDs or Bluetooth IDs, which is more than enough to uniquely ID you. You can combine that with facial rec now and link a face, sex and estimated age to the SSID combo. Who names their phone “<Your name>’s iPhone”? They can get your name too.
If you truly wanted to be paranoid, set your device to airplane mode (don’t forget your smartwatch or wallet Tile), cover your face (this shouldn’t be hard these days) and only then venture into a store. Oh, and pay your groceries with cash.
I actually requested a card at Safeway (wanted for convenience, not privacy), but apparently they are not giving those out anymore. You have to give them your phone number or else accept the additional costs for your food and lack of benefits at the gas station.
The rewards card is a much better model in my opinion because while it gives them quite a bit of data, it does provide some anonymity. I'm sure it is possible to reconstruct from that data who I am (i.e. convert it into direct PII like name and address), but that at least takes a lot more effort and processing than if they have my phone number.
Most people are ok giving up SOME privacy for the sake of convenience/cost savings. I doubt most people are truly willing to give up all privacy for said benefits once they understand what they are actually giving up.
The typical model that I'm familiar with on those rewards cards is that they just ask for that same info for you to get the card in the first place, so it's of basically no benefit privacy-wise. I suppose this can differ from place to place, and you could always supply a different number or one not strongly linked to you, I guess.
Not at most places and often times that number will have a large reward points pool already built up because others are also using it to avoid giving out their number.
That at least takes extra processing and data sets. I think that does matter as far as privacy is concerned. We tend to think of privacy and security as all or nothing, but it really doesn't have to be that way and may be impossible to achieve if you go down that route.
> It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude
You are being rude. The innocent cashier is forced to ask you that question and has no power to change the rules. Why not be polite to them? If you really want to change things, try asking to speak to the manager (after you're done checking out, of course!).
How is not giving personal information rude? He is just telling them the truth that they don't need that information which is correct. If a cashier were to ask you your bra size would you be okay with it? Why is it okay to ask for phone number which will give you all that and more.
Smart. Years ago I registered the number 500-5000 everywhere I could in my neighborhood. Just from word of mouth, the number got so popular they banned it at the local grocery store!
Give the phone number and zip of the store asking for the information. This way if there is data leak it is theroretically possible to track who originally asked for the data. This self-reference trick can be done with email address as well. The idea is that, in the event of unwanted data sharing, the consumer needs some way to know where the personal data came from originally.
DDG makes me nervous because I don’t actually understand their business model. Which isn’t to say they don’t have a well-known and viable one but I haven’t personally looked into it and as a result my gut feeling is that they are probably not an exception to this.
I use them anyway because they at least claim to be private and haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it. I probably should at some point take the time, though, to try to actually understand how they can viably exist in a way that isn’t going to succumb to the same corrupting incentives as google.
User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent quality that doesn't spy on you.
Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that would otherwise have stayed with Google.
The last few years Google has been busily lowering their quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more thinking.)
One of their core tenants (privacy) is unprofitable. There will be internal pressure to drop it.
Note how their predecessor, Google, started out lovable and quirky but then that facade crumbled under the weight of success.
I like DDG, I use DDG, I recommend DDG. And I don't even care about the privacy. All that matters to me is my search habits, emails and business-related-data are controlled by different entities.
But at some point I expect the privacy aspect of DDG will be a memory rather than a current talking point. The incentives are pretty simple.
When DDG does that we move on to the next option. It seems like the only way to not be eventually screwed over is to periodically move on from what you use.
This is why it's important to have replacements around. Particularly smaller and newer businesses that aren't yet interested in squeezing out every drop from you.
I use an ad blocker and DDG, but I still see ads when I search for something. The ads appear like Google search ads, but clearly labeled, so I doubt my ad blocker is going to be able to detect them without a feature to specifically target DDG.
I don't have a problem with those ads, since they're not overly intrusive, they're clearly labeled, and they're not targeted to me based on my personal information. Plus, DDG actually gives me the option to disable ads completely.
Personally, I don’t mind an ad or two. It’s not ads, per se, that have me using an ad blocker... it’s the “bad UI impact of tons of ads and pop-ups” that keep me in ad block mode. When a site wants me to turn off the ad blocker and it doesn’t look insane, I’m happy to comply. Same with DDG.
My worry is that if they ever achieved a dominant, Google-like position in the marketplace, that they would eventually lapse and go for greed. Even if the current DDG leadership is principled in this respect, companies go through turnover. Can't be evil > don't be evil.
As others have mentioned, they run ads — based on the search query of the page they appear on. They also (not unlike Brave) participate in affiliate programs. They get referral commissions when they funnel people to Amazon or eBay, whether through their shopping carousels or through !bangs.
> use them anyway because they at least claim to be private
Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get sued if they’re as terrible as Google. But
> haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it
I do doubt they’re as private as they could be, because they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their source code, and have had serious past privacy problems in other products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 ‘We’re not collecting your info, our servers are receiving it but just trust us we just throw it away’).
Don't they have ads? In reality, tracking doesn't do much when it specifically comes to search engine ads, since the user is literally giving you their intent in the search query itself. Tracking is more useful for showing ads as you browse the web in general. DDG can do effective search ads without any actual tracking, and that's their business model, which is very similar to Google Search.
'tracking' is a broad term but websites do track what you click on and if you return to the search results and click another link after clicking on the first link - this indicates that the first link didn't give the searcher the correct answer they were looking for. Whether or not that's tracking is up to you. DDG also of course does tracking for security purposes - scraping their search results doesn't go over well unless you also have a financial stake in outwitting their anti-abuse stuff.
Right, in this context though it's referring to users themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-specific data. You're just logging stats about the results themselves, not the user.
I'm not sure DDG can be considered an example of the default position in the search market.
Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.
Well, since the thing it is "necessary but not sufficient" for is me to be convinced you aren't tracking me, it does not. I use them as the best current alternative, but as I alluded to in my first comment, I'd be much more comfortable with them if I could give them some money.
But paying for a service connects your real world credit profile to this transaction. I feel privacy is already broken with the credit card companies selling this information.
When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you.
I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide from the first group.
Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay services.
I'm not worried about a company knowing I am their customer, with some name and credit card number.
I'm worried about them participating in the global privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere and abusively correlate it with the info others have to learn things about me.
Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort of thing.
I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info away from people, I think it's about the correlation. Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information starvation.
The credit card company is the one selling your relationships and purchase habits and they know exactly who you are and can connect you to everything else important in your life.
True, although it does shift some of the parties you need to trust. It’s not a perfect solution but, I think, it’s a good solution given what’s currently available. At least privacy.com is a central company which bases its reputation on privacy and as such has an incentive to avoid reputational harm.
What about Wikipedia? Do you consider the minimal logging they claim to do to be “user tracking” in the bad sense? Or do you think they’re doing more bad user tracking in secret?
Internet companies outside of the ad space also track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, much like grocery stores. They use it to inform product decisions by answering questions such as: Which features are our users using the most? Which features are the most profitable users using the most? How do we get more people to the end of the sales funnel? etc.
Are you ok with this kind of tracking? Genuinely asking... Personally I see it as "less bad" than straight up selling my data to another company, but I would still prefer companies didn't automatically track me at all, and instead relied on interviews with real users. Or at least make the tracking opt-in, Nielsen style.
I'm on the fence about this. From personal experience I'll nearly always opt-out just because I can. However I think this kind of user tracking is a better way to inform product decisions than user interviews.
Asking a user for their opinion about something doesn't generally provide as much valuable insight as monitoring their usage of a product.
> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy.
You don't get from your first point to here.
The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place.
This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code.
This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them.
The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it.
It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.
Seems to me that depends on the kind of regulation. If it's just "trust the regulator to keep ahead of Google" than that's one thing. But we can add other constraints on top of that. E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims.
Especially if we add bounties for catching Google's transgressions, I expect we could do quite well open-source, personalized regulation.
> E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims.
What happens if they lie? They have the data, they give you the code that does the user-facing thing with the data, then they copy the data to some other system where some unspecified foreign subsidiary uses it for arbitrary nefarious purposes without telling anybody.
And as much as it might help to have a law requiring cloud services to publish all their source code so people can verify that they're doing at least that part of what they say they're doing, do you really expect that to be enacted?
I think the right regulatory fix depends a lot on which particular service we're talking about and what the threats are. But the general goal of mandatory transparency reporting is to minimize the size of the possible lie. And I think that works even better when individuals and civil society groups have the opportunity to verify that. E.g., look at how many companies have been caught hoovering up data thanks to individual investigators looking at app behavior.
I don't think a law requiring all code to be published would get passed. But key code for, say, personalization algorithms? That seems doable. Places like health departments, ag inspectors, and workplace safety agencies get to inspect the physical machinery of production all the time. No reason we can't start extending that in to the virtual realm. Companies won't be excited for it, but they might prefer it to some of the more heavy-handed proposals going around now. (E.g., section 230 reform, antitrust concerns.)
Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.
Agreed. Just look all other paid software, computer services, and even computing machines.
Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.
We already have enough regulations and we still have so much problems. For one thing, it is selective enforcement. Secondly, the penalty is peanut. If penalty is a percentage of total revenue, it will change the behavior of the executive of the tech giant. Add some jail time for repeating offenders is a good idea too.
Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?
But, they hiked prices when the loyalty programs started in my area. At the very least, there’s a moral hazard of double dipping (charge normal margins for loyalty card users, double margins for everyone else).
You don't have access to the alternate universe where they didn't introduce a loyalty program to compare prices. Grocery prices go up naturally due to inflation so it's impossible to disentangle.
Groceries are also one of the most price sensitive items people buy and grocery stores run on incredibly thin margins so it's dubious to believe that a grocery story has much control over their pricing, independant of a loyalty card. If they could raise prices after the introduction of a card to increase total profits, why couldn't they have done it before then?
Far more likely is that they're using the extra revenue from the card to lower prices for you and gain market share from their competitors but the lower prices are swallowed up by general price increases.
People who don't sign up loyalty programs and other similar schemes have shown that they aren't price sensitive. They're the ideal segment to fleece via price discrimination.
The original comment I was referring to mentioned that paying for a service does not free you from tracking, and used groceries as an example.
That is a poor example because you are being compensated for your opting in to tracking.
A better example would be something you pay for, and you’re still tracked with no compensation.
The grocery store sells everything I buy to who, and is that information personally identifying? This seems insane that me buying a brand of toothpaste could be fed back into Google for more surveillance, but here we are.
Yep. That's why "loyalty cards" exist. Since they're not allowed to associate your purchases (or really any data) with your CC number to build a profile they give you a separate ID number that you key-in/scan when you buy things.
"Oh but you don't have to use your loyalty card."
Technically true but it's not "get a discount if you use your loyalty card" it's now "pay really inflated prices if you don't."
For what it's worth, I know people share loyalty cards across large groups to mess this up. Me, I just eat the cost. Developing a "I will not play your games" has been great. I know people who absolutely obsess over gamified consumption (e.g., airline miles) and I'm glad to have the brain space for things that matter.
I have to say I think loyalty cards are a distraction, why can’t they just track my via my card info/Apple Pay? I mean the thing is literally a kind of unique identifier...
Not sure I follow your logic. Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them.
If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so.
It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple.
As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.
> Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them.
Demand based systems aren’t always a good measure. Human trafficking has demand and people use those services. And there’s a, sadly, large number of people who want and purchase if available. No it needs to be fought on the supply side by stopping traffickers and protecting trafficked.
Companies use targeted ads because they work and are available. Not because they are moral.
They certainly aren’t equivalent by any means. But disproving GP’s point that targeted ads are used because people want them, therefore should be allowed.
Targeted ads and the data slurping involved is immoral to me. Not human trafficking bad, but probably as bad as working for coco cola.
I didn't say that people want them, merely that they are choosing to participate in the system. People being sex-trafficked are not, which is why it's an apples-to-orangutans comparison.
While the magnitude is different I think the relationships are similar.
I don’t choose to have my data included for targeted. Victims don’t choose to be trafficked. Marketers choose to buy ads using the data. Perverts choose to buy sex from victims.
Each has people choosing to use, and not choosing to be victims. Both have an intermediary selling the ads or the humans.
I don’t think so. Aside from frequently being included into Google’s data by sites that use GoogleAnalytics without ever asking me anything, these TOS click throughs aren’t honest agreements as they are long and confusing and change over time.
Even if I never log in and go to Google.com without an account they are using data on me and I never clicked anything.
I don’t have agency to avoid Google collecting data on me unless I stop using the internet. Perhaps if I always use TOR or something.
And that’s me who works in this area day in and day out. “Average users” definitely don’t have agency and can’t be expected to give informed consent to these data collections.
In medical research before informed consent [0] was law, experiments would have “click through TOS” that patients would accept without understanding, often with some token offering.
I don’t think it’s accurate or fair to say that random users clicking through agreements in exchange for free services have agency.
Depends on the goal of the organization, really. For organizations that follow the current business dogma (maximize short-term profit/increase shareholder value) then yes, they always have an incentive to screw over whomever they can.
But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1]
I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors.
There was no tracking on Cliqz, nor it will be any in Brave. To know more about the underlying tech of Cliqz there are interesting posts at https://0x65.dev, some of them covering how signals are collected, data, but no tracking.
I did work at Cliqz and now I work at Brave. I can tell for a fact, that all data was, is and will be, record-unlinkable. That means that no-one, not me, not the government, not the ad department can reconstruct a session with your activity. Again, there is no tracking, full anonymity, Brave would not do it any other way.
Brave buying Cliqz is the first corporate acquisition that's actually made me feel better about the acquirer, ever. I have no idea how to react to that. Keeping up the dev blog would probably make me start recommending Brave, where before I recommended against it.
Incidentally, do you know what's happening to the Cliqz browser?
100% this. There is a glass ceiling to the quality of a search engine if it's free; it starts with G.
The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool.
So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.
Personally, I don't have a problem with a service using aggregated usage data to improve their algorithms, even if that is technically "tracking" me. It's the selling of personalized segment data that bothers me.
ohduran probably means that there is no a priori logical reason for the two to go together. In theory they could be separated. However, it is far too enticing of a profit opportunity to use aggregated data if one has it en masse to sell personalized data.
I happen to disagree; almost any for-profit business is going to be doing some sort of aggregated usage data. I mean at the most basic level they've got to be tracking the number of customers they have. That doesn't mean all for-profit businesses ultimately devolve into data selling businesses.
Although perhaps ohduran is advancing a more nuanced argument. In particular perhaps the more detailed usage data you track, the more likely the siren call of selling that data is to be attractive. In order to compete with Google on search quality, perhaps you do need sufficiently detailed usage data that the call becomes irresistible.
I'm still not convinced that's true, but I could see how it plays out.
Oh wow, perhaps I was too terse and left too much room for interpretation. I meant that there is no way for a for-profit company to eventually sell personalized segment data once it has it, even if there were initial promises not to do so.
In that regard, the "siren call", as dwohnitmok says, it's a very appropriate way of encapsulating what I meant. You can be bold and not do it, but as soon as you have investors, they are going to demand it , pressure you into doing it, and if you do not comply replace you with someone who will not be sitting in a potentially profitable line of business and do nothing.
That's not really true. Google & Facebook only sell targeting for a reason: it's more profitable than selling the data itself. Why would you sell the user data you worked so hard to collect when you can sell targeting on it again and again? It's actually in Google & Facebook's interest that no one except them have data on you.
What kind of training are the users providing that makes G better? I thought their secret was that they have better infrastructure to crawl and organize information?
I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.
One very simple metric to improve search results is testing how long a user visits a site. When users search for something, click a link and return to google seconds later you can assume that the result did not match what the user was searching for.
Because they're so dominant they can make changes to the system that make it worse. Haven't you noticed the decline in quality of Google search results over these past few years?
i find google is useless at this. They throw out irrelevant results that the Wise Men of Google think you want to see, or that they'd like you to see. DDG pay more attention to your wording. The drawback is they have fewer indexed pages.
I'd also wager this is probably the most useful or close to the most useful metrics you can use. With this metric, plus the user's persona (male or female, teen or elderly, and so forth), you have a fairly accurate user driven ranking system.
because the underlying assumption is that what they'll tell you is the truth, and that's not necessarily the case. Think of a Firefox plugin in, AdNauseam style, that always says NO.
But there's nothing stopping the same people from gaming existing logic that tracks user behavior except security through obscurity. But you also get dirty data via tracking where it's indistinguishable from backend if user found what they want or just gave up on trying for example.
It's a good point. I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but assuming that it's just a matter of infrastructure, then Bing wouldn't suck so much. Microsoft has the means, the engineering power and the incentive to crush a direct competitor. And yet, it sucks.
So in practice, the more data you have, the better the engine is. I don't have a theoretical reason for why that is the case, but thing is I don't actually need it.
Every time you click a result link, and every time you bounce back from that link, probably also scroll position and hovering, you are providing potentially useful training data.
One possible upside is the Metafilter principle: If you charge $5, you get a higher quality signal by excluding a lot of chaff. The probability that your search engine user is human gets much closer to 1, and you save a lot (but not all) of the anti-abuse effort. This gives you better signal on which websites are interesting, so you need possibly orders of magnitude less data to do a good job.
Back in the day (late 90s) there was a company called Copernic that had a good search engine with a REALLY good desktop client. I remember being able to do all sort of filters, sorting and crazy searches. IIRC It was paid, and it was really way ahead of the simple search operations you can even currently do with Google (actually, Google has constantly removed search abilities as time goes by, like for example, anyone remember when Google Search could show tweeter search results? or that you could "block" domains from search results)
Honestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:(
Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.
This explains so much. I thought they were distinct operators. I thought quoting meant must match exactly, and the plus meant must be present. So +"baz" meant it must be exactly baz, and it must be present. +baz meant baz, or some variant like bazzes must be present.
I would not get too excited until you read the agreement they present you with. If you are a paying customer and they make promises, such as privacy-related ones, then those could theoretically be enforceable, with quantifiable damages at least equal to what you have paid. Will they accept that potential liability. Google won't. If Brave breaks their privacy promises to millions of paying end users, will they try to prevent the possibility of class-actions when potentially hundreds, maybe thousands or more of them all simultaneously "ask for their money back". Does paying by itself magically transform empty promises into kept ones What if the promisor can break the promise and keep the payments.
My views similarly changed on email. It would have been inconceivable for me to pay for email 10 years ago. Now I'm happy to pay for a service that does the basics well, is primarily considering my interests, and will have competent customer service if something goes wrong.
I've really 180'd on this over the past two years. I've always loved business models that allowed free access, but now I'm very much focused on a business models that are sustainable, and without relying on being able to sell my data to keep the lights on. A service I can pay for access, in a sustainable business arrangement, is my new preferred model.
What if it's less profitable to run a paid search engine? Will they run both free/paid side-by-side? And how can one be certain they won't profit off the query data on the backend anyways?
Is there any reason I should think Brave won't prioritize profit motives first in 5, 10 years when investors or markets expect returns?
I do think that fewer things need to be free. But there’s no reason to believe that free means we must lose our privacy.
OTA television, for example, had been providing decades worth of extremely expensive programming for free. And this lost us absolutely no privacy.
There is no reason that ads have to invade our privacy. They can go back to targeting based on broad geographical and age demographics.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say the government passes a law that says that ads cannot be based on any factors more privacy invasive than your zip code and 10 year age range. It’s not like companies would stop paying for ads. They would pay less, but probably still enough to maintain free services, like Google did in its initial days.
there's also lots of smaller niche platforms/services that don't, sometimes even funded exclusively by donations. I think the size of the organization has a lot to do with the likelihood that your data is getting harvested as well.
give me the option to block certain sites from results and prioritize others, I would pay a monthly fee just for that level of customization. I hate searching to download something and only finding spam in the top 5 results.
I'm convinced that it's possible to build a better search engine than Google by using community-influenced results, rather than try to do magic.
I'd definitely pay for a search engine where we can collectively downvote to hell any SEO spam. That would be the only way to incentivize sites to provide actual quality rather than cheating the algorithms.
> As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
Paid is still centralized. Decentralization isn't an answer, because people make their own decisions and a collective decision contains a lot of power. The only way to achieve true decentralization is to eliminate communication entirely. I believe it is referred to "Babel's tower". Centralization means we have no freedom and no privacy. With decentralization, 51% could conspire to murder the 49%. That experiment, taken after a few iterations, would quickly turn us extinct.
The idea is interesting. My view on the economics side is that the flaw is that this is a for profit company trying something new to make more profit. There's nothing wrong with that except that what they are selling is a commodity (bing, google, duck duck go, ..).
So, that doesn't sound like a sound plan. In fact it sounds a lot like everything Mozilla tried and failed to make money with in the last few years. Maybe users will pay for X .... nope they won't pay for X either. Ironically, Mozilla's main business remains reselling Google's search.
What's Brave's business model at this point? I'm assuming that the attention token business is at this point not really delivering substantial revenue.
Anyway, a couple of weaknesses here with both these business models (search and BAT):
- They are tied to Brave the browser, which while popular has a tiny market share. So, both solutions are cut off from the vast majority of users, including the fraction of a percent likely to be an early adopter of this (i.e. by actually paying). Fractions of fractions don't add up to a whole lot of revenue.
- That browser happens to be built by Google and also depended upon by Apple & Microsoft (i.e. Chromium). Between those three, they control access to most of the users via their apps stores and operating systems. They also control the main contenders Cliqz is supposed to compete with: Google, Bing & DDG (which is Bing). That sounds like an uncomfortable place to be as a would be competitor. Also, there's the Apple and Google tax to worry about with any kind of revenue: Brave users putting more cash in the coffers of Apple and Google basically.
- Users might pay for quality. That raises the question how you will get that. DDG is popular but a key reason for people to not use it remains that sometimes they just aren't good enough. And it's basically Bing, which depends on MS putting loads of cash and resources in it. I found myself reaching for Google a lot in the half year I used it until ultimately I decided that I did not have time for too many fruitless searches where I wasted time before ending up finding what I needed on Google. I reverted back to Google. And that's not because I enjoy being tracked or in their clutches: they are just that good.
- Brave as a walled garden for exclusive paid features does not make sense: it's too small. Both BAT and search as commercially offered features would have more users (and thus paying users) if they weren't tied to Brave the browser. IMHO both would actually need to be structured under a non profit organization for long term success (for users, not for Brave).
have you heard of greed? Do you think they care about loosing customers in that scenario? Where will they go? Dont be soo naive... they might start with honest and clean intentions but that will most likely change, or the pople running the company will change, people are soo easily corupted, especialy in a world filled with vice
Consider that it’s not just the changing times but also your own changing economic situation. Would you have had a spare $20/month foe a search engine subscription as a 16 year old? I sure had better uses for my money back then than something like this, privacy be damned.
i would probably just switch to bing or duckduckgo (aka bing) at this point. google used to be unparalleled in finding what you're actually looking for but their search results have steadily been getting worse.
How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.
I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.