So what better time to sit down with DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg for a chat about what privacy really means. The difference in the proportion of web users who cared about their activity being tracked depended on how much they had heard about government surveillance.2019 is the year Facebook announced a “pivot to privacy.” At the same time, Google is trying to claim that privacy means letting it exclusively store and data-mine everything you do online. Research published earlier this year by the think-tank Pew Research Center (PRC) revealed that between 38% and 54% of US adults surveyed did not want their search engine provider to save any information about their activity.

Another factor cited for causing a spike in adoption rates included Google's 2012 decision to change its privacy policy to allow tracking across all of its services. One of the key factors to DuckDuckGo's recent growth, according to Weinberg, was the mass surveillance revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden. Weinberg also revealed that the traffic coming from the anonymous web browser Tor was 'not significant' yet but that he would like it to be a lot more. All that tracking is for the rest of the internet without this search intent, and that's why you're tracked across the internet with these same ads.' 'These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. 'Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. It is a myth you need to track people to make money in web search,' Weinberg said during the AMA session. Gabriel Weinberg took to YCombinator's Hacker News to conduct an AMA (ask me anything) on 7 October, making a dig at Google and other major search engines by claiming that privacy does not need to be sacrificed for profitability.

The CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo has revealed that the privacy-focused search engine is making a profit despite not tracking its users' online activity and search history. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg revealed that the online search engine is now profitable Gabriel Weinberg/ Twitter

Duckduckgo gabriel weinberg