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Weekly News Digest

January 22, 2019 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

The Future of DuckDuckGo

This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo’s proposition: ‘The big tech companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won’t.’ In effect, it’s an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms attempting to make it big—or at least sustainable—by putting their customers’ privacy and security first. And unlike the previous generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren’t exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and paranoiacs. The same day [DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO Gabriel] Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo’s search engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries—a new daily record for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo’s traffic has been increasing at a rate of ‘about 50 percent a year,’ a claim backed up by the company’s publicly available traffic data.

‘You can run a profitable company—which we are—without [using] a surveillance business model,’ Weinberg says. If he’s right, DuckDuckGo stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the coming era of data privacy. If he’s wrong, his company looks more like a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over the world.

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