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My goal is to get meaningful privacy protection in the hands of as many people as possible. We learned from extensive research that mainstream people do not wan

by yegg 4y ago

My goal is to get meaningful privacy protection in the hands of as many people as possible. We learned from extensive research that mainstream people do not want to install multiple things, and yet multiple types of protection are required to get meaningful privacy protection. So we are building them into one package, and are diligently working to make these protections as good as they can be.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> learned from extensive research that mainstream people do not want to install multiple things, and yet multiple types of protection are required to get meaningful privacy protection This is a reasonable position. The shift in positioning that's driving the confusion is real, though. DDG (search) has an almost absolutist stance on privacy. That was differentiated. The nuanced tradeoff you describe, between privacy and convenience, which I agree boosts the actual outcomes, is something else. It's more similar to Apple's philosophy. Which is fine. I use their products as well as yours. But it's different in a fundamental, and to many a meaningful, way. That's going to be difficult to brush away without making it look like there's something to hide. (None of this could be said to have been predictable ex ante.)
clairity 4y ago
let's be clear, your goal is to make money via a privacy brand positioning. that's fine, but it's not the same as simply "to get meaningful privacy protection in the hands of as many people as possible". this change in emphasis has been palpable in the 4 Ps (marketing strategy) of duckduckgo over the past few years.
Terretta 4y ago
Or you could partner with a trusted brand like 1Blocker who is not forced to relax protections against MSFT. You could give the user one easy experience. But you won’t, because you are explicitly not working to make these protections “as good as they can be”. You are working to capture the user’s entire session and monetize owning that. (I’d like to know the eventual purpose of owning that, and personally I’d like to see subscription somewhere, because any other monetization is likely to be user-hostile.) FWIW, I’m super annoyed with you. I’ve gotten countless normals — and certain enterprises with 10k to 100k users — to switch defaults to you, and they now trust you (thanks to trusting me) on privacy in a simple binary way. Which you’re proving wrong. Now I have to do diligence before recommending your brand, and that’s shitty.

by yegg 4y ago

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> learned from extensive research that mainstream people do not want to install multiple things, and yet multiple types of protection are required to get meaningful privacy protection This is a reasonable position. The shift in positioning that's driving the confusion is real, though. DDG (search) has an almost absolutist stance on privacy. That was differentiated. The nuanced tradeoff you describe, between privacy and convenience, which I agree boosts the actual outcomes, is something else. It's more similar to Apple's philosophy. Which is fine. I use their products as well as yours. But it's different in a fundamental, and to many a meaningful, way. That's going to be difficult to brush away without making it look like there's something to hide. (None of this could be said to have been predictable ex ante.)

clairity 4y ago

let's be clear, your goal is to make money via a privacy brand positioning. that's fine, but it's not the same as simply "to get meaningful privacy protection in the hands of as many people as possible". this change in emphasis has been palpable in the 4 Ps (marketing strategy) of duckduckgo over the past few years.

Terretta 4y ago

Or you could partner with a trusted brand like 1Blocker who is not forced to relax protections against MSFT. You could give the user one easy experience. But you won’t, because you are explicitly not working to make these protections “as good as they can be”. You are working to capture the user’s entire session and monetize owning that. (I’d like to know the eventual purpose of owning that, and personally I’d like to see subscription somewhere, because any other monetization is likely to be user-hostile.) FWIW, I’m super annoyed with you. I’ve gotten countless normals — and certain enterprises with 10k to 100k users — to switch defaults to you, and they now trust you (thanks to trusting me) on privacy in a simple binary way. Which you’re proving wrong. Now I have to do diligence before recommending your brand, and that’s shitty.