00:00 Hello, I'm Seth For Privacy, and welcome to Season 2, Episode 8 of Opt Out. Opt Out's a show where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data sovereignty. Have you been considering a more privacy-preserving search engine, but you're not really sure where to start? This episode, we're going to sit down with Kelly from Startpage to chat about the Startpage search engine, how it works, its limitations, and a lot more.

Welcome on to Opt Out, Kelly. Hi, Seth. Happy to be here. Yeah, very thankful that you're willing to come on, and it's been helpful over email, but just really excited to chat more about Startpage, and I've really been circling back to Startpage after actually using them first when I started my privacy journey. They're kind of the first search engine that I started using, and I wanted to circle back and give them a try, especially with y'all's latest extension that you released.

So really excited to sit down, answer some questions that I had, that listeners had, and just learn a little bit more there. But for those who don't know you or aren't familiar with Startpage, do you mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what Startpage does? Definitely. So I am the director of brand for Startpage. And Seth, as you pointed out, we were the very first private search engine that was ever created back in 2006.

So we have been offering private search for over 15 years. And it started in the Netherlands, and now it's grown to be a global private search engine where people from all over the world are able to search for anything without passing their IP address or any personal data. They have access to Google search index through a unique relationship that we have with Google. Google search for Google search engine. And after they search on Startpage, they receive unprofiled, unpersonalized search results and never have a search history ever again.

So that's a good deal. Well, I definitely want to dive a little bit more into Startpage search itself, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about kind of the personal journey that people have gone through that I have on the show. And obviously, you working for a privacy-preserving company and a company that very much seems to value privacy. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what it was that woke you up to the need for personal privacy. Absolutely.

Happy to talk about that. And the answer might surprise you, but my background really is in branding and marketing. And I'd done quite a bit of nonprofit work on the side. And when I came across Startpage and the opportunity to help grow their brand, I did not know that private search was even an option. I thought, you know, passing over your data was the sacrifice you had to make to access the Internet. So my privacy journey really began to know that I had an option when it came to being online, an option to choose when and where and how I share personal data.

So Startpage really combined, the opportunity to Startpage really combined the ability to take my experience of marketing products and digital products mainly to people around the world. But to do it from a perspective where it's a free product, it's easy to use. We genuinely feel like we're helping people. And then adding on that extra layer of providing a choice for people. I think that's one of the biggest conversations I have with folks when they're like, wait, I have an option when it comes to searching online.

Yeah, I think Google definitely got the, I guess, got the branding win by making the word Google synonymous with searching online. So a lot of people don't realize that there's other options or maybe they've stumbled across like Bing or Yahoo search, just having it in a browser or something like that. But it's definitely a space where a lot of people don't even realize that there are other options out there because Google is so synonymous with search.

So I definitely understand kind of coming across Startpage and not even knowing that there were options out there. But you mentioned that Startpage was started 15 years ago, which is pretty crazy because that's very early on in really the search engine space, much less the privacy space and the privacy preserving search engine space. So what was it that prompted the creation of Startpage all the way back in 2006? Yes. Well, it was well before my time, but I've talked to Robert, our founder, about this many times to get the story from him.

And it is quite interesting. He was working on and had a meta search engine called iXquick, and he was working with his engineers, and they were going through the data that was being collected on people. And Robert, Robert E.G. Beans, our founder, he has a legal background. And as he started to sift through the data that was available on individuals that was all tied back to their IP address, he began to feel very uncomfortable about it. You know, people searching about their health, family issues, all tied back to a singular IP address at the time.

And, you know, he asked his team, do we really need this data? Do we need all of this information on people? And at the time, and I still think it is the thought process of a lot of companies is, we don't know if we need the data, but let's store it because we might need it at some point, or we might be able to sell it and make a profit from it at some point. And Robert didn't want to do that from a legal perspective and from an ethical perspective.

So he poised the question, what if we delivered search without tracking? And I think a lot of people have scratched their heads at that and thought about, you know, how would that even work? And at the time, he had great relationships with some of the folks that were building Google and spreading it in Europe. And, you know, they made a contract to try it. And the reason why he chose Google over a Microsoft Bing is, as you said before, Google has, is synonymous with search.

They've built the world's best search index. So he was able to create a pretty unique contract with them that allows us to pay for their search index and really be that conduit, that intermediary between an individual and Google so that when they search, Google doesn't know that it's an individual. They just see start page searching. So all of that happened back in 2006. We've come a long way from that. We've added a lot new, many new features. Our interface has updated.

But that was the pivotal moment of how it all started. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. And I'm glad that you mentioned kind of the data that can be collected about someone just through search. I mean, if we don't even consider the other aspects of data collection and tracking that go on today, if you just kind of pause, take a moment and think about all of the things that you've Googled or searched or start paged, whatever the verb is of that. But if you think about the things that you've searched and think about what it would look like for somebody who has a list of all of the things that you've searched from your specific IP address, just start to think about the picture that they can get about who you are, about, like you mentioned, your health problems, maybe mental health problems.

They could get information like where you go to school, your kids go to school, where you shop, where you eat. There's just a treasure trove of data there. So that's why having a privacy-preserving search option is so, so vital because it really can be a hub of data collection. And I'd like also that you mentioned that part of what you do is you provide non-personalized search results so that people aren't getting things crafted specifically for them.

They're able to get just kind of the raw search results and not have the issues of information being manipulated or search results getting manipulated as well based on who you are, where you live, your political views, all of that kind of stuff. So there's a lot that goes into a search engine and a lot that can be gained by a company by collecting that data and profiling the users. So I'm glad that it was a choice very early on for Startpage to be conscious about that, to think of the ethical implications and not just sit on the data in hopes it's useful or actively profit off the data itself.

Definitely. And when you're talking about, too, about, you know, receiving manipulated or personalized search results, the algorithms that are built upon people's online behavior, you know, sometimes aren't completely nefarious. They're simply built on, you know, what websites you go to, what news you tend to read, what social media posts or accounts you interact with. However, you do, you can create this echo chamber for yourself, which they call a filter bubble.

And then you're not seeing the full picture of the world and information out there and, you know,

10:00 You can be trapped in that really from your own behavior. And then there's the whole other side of online targeting where, you know, election manipulation and all of that is readily available by knowing what you do online and knowing how to target you. Yeah, absolutely. And that is a great call that it's not necessarily that like Google are evil and are like actively manipulating your search results to harm you. But a lot of the issues can come in with how the algorithm actually builds its search results around you.

And I think you really broke it down well there. But it is important that I don't think like Google is always doing like evil things with your search results, but it can be a piece of it. And even the kind of non-nefarious things can have issues and can have kind of a ripple effect on the access you have to data online. So when someone kind of jumps in, starts using Startpage for their search engine, what's kind of the one thing or the things that you hope that users get for making that switch?

That's a really good question. One is peace of mind. When you're home in the privacy of your own home, you know, you might close the blinds, you know, so that your neighbors aren't seeing what you're watching on television or somebody walking by can't, you know, see you in your house clothes. You know, when you make phone calls or, you know, you're journaling, you tend to, you know, go do that in a quiet space so you can have your privacy. When you're searching online, I mean, sometimes I wish that on non-private search engines, there was just like a blinking red recording light because that is what's happening.

So I would love for people to, when they start searching on Startpage, to feel that peace of mind that I can ask these questions. I can search for these queries knowing that I truly am the only person who knows that I'm looking for this. And it won't be used in a digital ad later on, or, you know, it won't be used in a criminal or civil law case to, you know, set the tone of who I am as a person. So peace of mind is a really big one that I hope that people take when they search on Startpage. And I think that's such a good point in the general privacy space and something that I don't think I harp on enough.

And I don't hear other people in this space harp on enough either, just in that people, I think, kind of view people who care about privacy, like myself, like obviously you and Startpage. I think sometimes there's the view that we're kind of paranoid and constantly trying to figure out who's watching us and all of these kinds of things. But a big piece of really starting to care about personal privacy more deeply is to get that peace of mind of knowing that we're not having to worry about the search engine that we're using, collecting all of the data around our search results and building a profile on us and all of the things that go with that.

But it really is that peace of mind as you start to build out your toolkit, build out your personal privacy. It helps you to be able to step back and not have that constant nagging thing in the back of your mind going like, what's this data going to be used for? How can this search that I'm putting in now come back to bite me later on? Or how can this be combined with what I just posted on Facebook? Or how could all of these things come together?

It really is that peace of mind that comes with taking back control of your data and taking back control of your personal privacy and being able to really step back and say, I feel good because I don't have to worry about these things. So that's a huge part of it. I'm glad that you brought that up as a key thing that users hopefully get from using Startpage. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, you and many other privacy experts have done a great job outlining all of the very technical reasons.

And just peace of mind is just that really human reminder that, hey, you don't have to sacrifice your privacy to access the internet. Absolutely. Yeah, there is. There can be convenience tradeoffs, but you don't have to give that up to be able to still have an online life and still live like a relatively normal human being. Yeah. And that's the whole point of it, too. Like Startpage is meant to be that Venn diagram spot in the middle where it's convenience and privacy.

It's free to use. And we do that by serving contextual ads. So there are three clearly marked ads at the top of every search results page. And those ads are populated by your search query. So if you search for bicycles, an advertiser who has purchased the search query term bicycle will show three ads there. So that's how we're able to provide a free product for anyone to use. The advertising on there isn't behavioral like bicycles. Somebody who recently purchased X product lives in X area is of X demographic. And so that convenience part of offering it for free for people and then making it super easy to use. You go to startpage.com and you set it as your homepage or you install our extension and it sets your search to default immediately. We're really trying to bridge that conveniency privacy story. Yeah, yeah, I definitely love that. And I think I'll do a good job too of making it feel very familiar to someone who's used to using Google Search. It's a pretty easy transition there. Well, that's good to hear. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

We talked a little bit about the kind of the advantages that using startpage comes with and the things you can gain from that. But I'd love to hear if there are any limitations that users should be aware of when using startpage, maybe in comparison to Google or something like that, or maybe just general limitations of y'all's approach to privacy preserving search. Good question. And if I could have a sit down tutorial with each new user, I'd love to, because it does take a shift in the way that you write your query. So we don't know anything about you as an individual. So if you search for best coffee near me, your search results aren't going to be exactly what you're hoping for.

You know, you'll need to put in either your zip code or near an address or, you know, the city in there. Same thing for whether, you know, you do have to put in some location information that then as soon as you enter that into your query, it's forgotten, right? So you don't have to have when a website asks for you to share your location, we'll never ask for that. So but when you enter your query, you yourself do have to manually put that in. So that's one kind of trade off where you do have to think through your search query.

So you're going to get a bit more on private search and you're going to get a bit more on private search than you would on a non-private search engine. Other elements are, I mean, we get this question from our users. users all the time is, you know, why can't we have the infinite scroll? And that really is because we as a company pay a price for every single search that people make on our search engine. So we do have, you know, a set amount of search results per page. And that is because per page, per search, start page is paying money for you to do that. So that's one call out. Yes.

Yeah, I did not, did not realize that that was the reason for that. I guess I've never really worried about it, because I don't have to dig that deeply for search results, I guess. But that's a really interesting call out. And especially the one about just, you need to do the work to contextualize your search, rather than relying on Google having the all seeing eye overview of your life and being able to fill in the details around your search to help contextualize it for you. You really kind of have to do the legwork there, which again, to me is well worth the convenience trade-off to gain that privacy and to gain that peace of mind. But definitely a good thing for users to be aware of that you may have to be a little bit more specific and particular and nuanced about the way that you approach writing your search queries themselves.

Yeah, it does take, it does take a moment to rethink the way that you approach each query. But once you get going, it's absolutely feels like second nature to anyone. And we do have per search where you can refine your search as well. So you can refine it by what region you're based in, you can refine it by date and time. So there are also different ways where if you aren't feeling like you're getting the search results that you're looking for, make sure that on your search results page, you do take a look at the options you have there to filter and refine your search.

Good call outs for sure. And if you did get the chance to sit down with, with every listener and walk them through using start page, what are some settings or features that you would kind of walk them through or, or get them familiar with when they're first starting to use start page? So yeah, so one would be taking them through, you know, just that kind of clear query writing. I love our weather feature. That's one I would love for people to go through simply because weather is something that we check every day. So if you can do it in a private way with us,

20:00 sharing your location, you're going to cut down a lot on the amount of data harvesting that happens through weather websites and weather apps. And we have a really great widget that pulls in weather information, seven-day forecasts, you know, basically everything you'd want to know about your upcoming week of weather through an API called tomorrow.io. So I'd really focus people on learning to do that or on training themselves to check their weather daily on that. Another feature that is just, you know, quick and easy to use is our language translate feature. I work on a global team, really kind of based in the Netherlands, Germany, and the US. So constantly translating back and forth. And there's an excellent, completely private language translator that has made my life easier. So that's one that I'd want to plug for somebody joining. But everything too, from accessing a calculator to checking stocks information, there's some fun, really cool features that we've come out with that, that, you know, unless you're using it daily, you might not know about.

Awesome. Thanks for walking us through that. And I'm curious, where do you get the translation results from? Is that also pulling from Google or is there a different service that you're using for the translation itself? It is from Google. But for like weather, for stocks, for calculator, we're actually pulling in those from other sources. So not all of our search is directly from Google. We are starting more and more partnerships and indexes to pull from.

Awesome. And this can be a little bit of a weird question or awkward one, but I think it's really helpful to kind of take a look at and compare Startpage with the other alternatives that are out there. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on kind of what other tools are out there that are kind of the key competitors or alternatives, you know, how you want to look at it. And then maybe just what makes Startpage search better or unique in your opinion.

Awkward. I mean, the way that we look at it is rising tides of privacy lift all ships. And so, I mean, let's just say it, DuckDuckGo has done an incredible job to raise awareness on privacy from having, you know, fantastic articles published in the New York Times about privacy. And, you know, the, you know, the ability to do contextual advertising over behavioral advertising has been fantastic. They also have people who are helping support better legislation around privacy.

So, you know, we really do look at DuckDuckGo not as, you know, a competitor as much as somebody who's done fantastic work in raising awareness around privacy. That said, they are the most comparable product to Startpage. So probably useful for me to compare Startpage's search engine to their search engine. The main difference is that DuckDuckGo is a US-based company. Startpage is a Netherlands-based company. And we take that nuance different, pretty seriously at our company.

We have on-premise servers. And that's the first and the final layer, the first and third layer of protection that someone's search gets processed through. Only members of our European team have access to those secured on-premise servers. And that ensures that any user worldwide is thus protected by European and Dutch privacy legislation, which is by far the most stringent available. So, you know, it's not that we think the American team would try to get someone's personal data.

It's just that, you know, we're subject to US legislation while our European colleagues are not. So that's a big difference between DuckDuckGo, just the Europe versus US difference. The other major difference is they pull their search results from Microsoft Bing. Well, Startpage pulls search results from Google. And again, that just started from that really fantastic relationship that Robert has fostered over the years with Google. And people go to search engines to find information, not to just continue searching.

And there is, Google search index is just better than Microsoft being hands down. Yeah. I will say where DuckDuckGo, I think has a great strength and has made kind of further strides that StartPages catching up on is their user interface. Ours is, you know, improving over the last few years, but theirs is super slick and, you know, it's very visual. So they have done a great job with that. And the last bit is we have anonymous view, which DuckDuckGo does not offer.

So to the left of every single search result, you'll see a mask icon. If you click that mask icon, you can actually open the search result using a proxy. And the proxy ensures that this website can't set any type of cookies or tracking on your client ID. That website sees that StartPages there. So you'll even notice that the date and time gets switched to StartPage on the page. And that means that you can not only search in private, but you can also browse websites in your search results completely anonymously.

So that's a standout feature that you could only find on StartPage. And so that's essentially proxying all of the web traffic for that page through StartPage's servers, I assume? Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. It can provide some privacy, especially from the website that you're browsing itself. Yeah, I mean, it was an important addition and it has evolved most definitely since it launched in 2018. There are still some websites where Anonymous View is not going to work on because they won't let a person enter their website without that level of tracking.

So if you notice that Anonymous View isn't working on, let's say, a travel booking website or like a flight search website, probably because there's a lot of tracking and you should be really careful on that website. Yeah, it's always a bad sign when I'm browsing and have like Ublock Origin and maybe like Braves blocking and try to load a website and everything just fails miserably. It's usually not a sign that there's an issue on my end, but usually a sign there's a lot of tracking going on.

Exactly. They want to load all the things. So you've mentioned that really the location of StartPage is an advantage and that that helps with just data privacy laws and the approach that you take to actually hosting StartPage's servers. As far as that goes, kind of how is logging handled by StartPage? Like what logs, if any, are kept of user's activity? What's the retention period if you have one? That kind of thing I think is useful for people who are looking into using a central solution like StartPage, which while privacy preserving, obviously, y'all will still get the source IP and stuff like that and then can choose what to do with it.

So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your approach to logging users and what happens there. Good question. So we don't log any type of personal information, IP address, nothing like that. We don't log a person's search query or search history. What we do know, and this helps us from a business perspective, is at the region level, country level, the volume of searches on StartPage per day. So never to the singular level, we'll never know, like, this person hit this many searches.

It's all anonymous and cumulative. But we do know region and country level the volume of searches per day that we're receiving. And interestingly, more than half of our searches come from Germany. Would not expect that. Yeah. So, I mean, we started in Germany or we started in Europe, in the Netherlands, which is, you know, just stone's throw. And also, Germans are incredibly privacy aware, both from historical injustices that have occurred through to also, you know, just big tech didn't kind of grow up in Germany.

So people are more skeptical of these U.S. tech products coming in and, you know, where's my data going, which is a great, great thing. Yeah. Yeah, that does make sense. I do forget that Germany and Germans in general are a bit more, or really, I should say, a lot more privacy focused or privacy aware than people in America, which is obviously where I'm at and most people that I engage with. Definitely a difference in perspective there and hopefully we can work our way towards being a little bit more like Germany in their approach to data and privacy generally over time.

Let's take a quick break from this episode to chat about the sponsors of Opt Out, Cake Wallet, and LocalMonero. Cake Wallet is a key tool that I use daily as it allows me to easily and quickly use Monero for private by default payments. It's available in both iOS and Android and is a fantastic way to get started buying and using Monero with a simple and easy

30:00 to understand user experience. I regularly onboard new users to Cake Wallet and hope that it will help simplify and ease your journey into cryptocurrency. If you're interested in purchasing Monero for the first time or helping to bring others into a parallel economy, I'd recommend you look at using LocalMonero, like I do, to buy and sell Monero while maintaining your privacy and avoiding invasive exchange surveillance. LocalMonero is entirely peer-to-peer and is an important part of opting out of the surveillance state and into a parallel economy.

Thank you to both sponsors for their incredible support and partnership, and I hope you'll take a moment after the episode to learn more in the show notes or at optoutpod.com slash sponsors. So another question that I had for you is really just kind of, it may be a more technical one, but it's one that circles around how Startpage can compare with a self-hosted solution like SearX or Whoogle Search or those other alternatives out there that a person can choose to host for themselves as opposed to using a service like Startpage.

Yeah, so SearX, Whoogle, the main difference between them and Startpage's private search engine are that they scrape search indexes out there. Another word to describe them are crawlers. So one is it's going to take a little bit of extra work on the user side to self-host that. And also there's a lot of privacy implications that go along with that that make your self-hosting that make something slightly less private than what you'll get by just going to Startpage.com and entering your searches there.

And, you know, the search indexes that SearX and Whoogle are crawling, they have their own defense mechanisms on there to prevent that. While it's not illegal, they are considered, you know, bad actors and it's something that the search indexes want to avoid. So a lot of times they'll block these bad actors or offending IP networks so that they're protecting their search index and their systems that are built from them. So really, I mean, at the end of the day, the major difference is the self-hosting work that you're going to end up doing, the clean interface that you'll get by using Startpage's search results and being able to filter and adjust what your search results look like.

And then at the end of the day, too, you know, Startpage does pay to access those search indexes. We're not using any type of crawler that would be considered a bad actor. So by using Startpage, you're also funding a business that, you know, is paying to provide privacy in the right way. Yeah, and you hit on a couple, I think, really key points. And that last point you made is a really important one that while people can use things like SearX or Whoogle, it is important that if we align with the ethos and the ideals of a company like Startpage, somebody who really does seem to be caring deeply about the personal privacy of their users while building a profitable business, a way that we can give back and help to grow that ecosystem is to use those tools.

Like you mentioned, you'll earn revenue and are able to be profitable through the three kind of ad results, the contextual ad results that you provide at the top of each search. So when users choose to use Startpage, they are helping to fund a company that aims to be privacy-preserving and that does care about the privacy ecosystem as a whole. So I think that's a really important one. And then also the privacy implications of self-hosting a search solution.

It is really important that people understand that if you host something like CRX or Google at home, you're not really gaining privacy from the search engine that is underlying that. Like Google is using Google search results. So if you're using Google and you're not using the Tor functionality that's built into it, your IP is still being sent directly to Google. What you are doing is you're gaining an interface that's stripped of the trackers and below it that goes into Google's search engine, but you're not necessarily gaining privacy there.

And the same would go for if you were hosting those things with a VPS provider. They're likely logging the incoming and outgoing traffic and they can have a picture into the ways that you're using those self-hosted search engine tools as well. So there's definitely some privacy implications that people need to understand what they're getting and if they're using it for kind of a new interface on top of Google or something like that. I think that's definitely a key advantage of those and you can self-host it and gain that.

But if you're looking for privacy, you need to be very conscious of the approach that you're taking there to ensure that you're actually gaining privacy from the underlying search engine that, like you said, is being scraped or being pulled by a tool like CRX or Google search. Wow. Very well said, Seth. So I'd love to pivot a little bit into the Start Page Privacy Protection Extension. It's a mouthful that y'all just launched and hear a little bit more about that.

So the first question around that is really just kind of what prompted the creation of the new extension. Yeah. Well, we touched on it a bit before. We're always thinking about how do we make Start Page more convenient for people? And then the second question is also, you know, how can we as a company better protect individuals' privacy rights? So the extension works in two ways to help users with that. So one is, instead of having to go to the browser, change your default search to Start Page or, you know, set Start Page as your homepage, you can install the extension and immediately Start Page becomes your default search on Chrome or Firefox.

And so that's a very convenient one install, your set, you can then begin searching directly from your address bar. The other element of it is that we wanted to be able to protect people beyond private search. And with this extension, once it's installed, immediately on websites that you're on, it will block trackers and cookies. And so we did a little bit of a testing research assignment with some of the most popular websites. And on some of the new sites, there were over 40 trackers and cookies per visit.

So with the extension installed and this automatically blocking trackers and cookies, you can block a significant amount of third-party trackers that would have been set on your client ID immediately. Another cool feature on it is that it shows privacy scores per website that you're on. So it just gives you that visual understanding of, okay, I'm on a website that has poor privacy practices. I should be more aware here. And it allows the individual just to have a bit more control and information about what they're doing online, which is a huge thing for us, is just making sure that people are aware where they are and, you know, where they're safe or not.

It also has some really cool other features built in there of, like, sending the global privacy signal and, you know, disabling some social trackers. So there's a lot of cool little features in there. But really, the search, the cookie and tracker blocking, and the privacy score and reports are the main areas that can really change an online experience for someone. Yeah, thanks for running through the details there. And I do like that there's a big focus on visualizing the details of a website's approach to privacy and making that very transparent to the user.

I think there's so much value in starting to teach people or at least show people what sites are trying to take advantage of their data, what sites are trying to load a ton of trackers and collect a bunch of things and really prey on their data with or without their consent. So visualizing that and making it very approachable like the 1 to 5 score that you all give to websites based on the tracking that they do and the cookies that they have I think is a very important piece of building out tools like this because letting users see this site is trying to take advantage of your data.

We've blocked this but you should be aware that the site has very poor privacy practices is a very important piece of helping people to start to shift away from using those websites, using those services and start to use different services that maybe do care more deeply about privacy and take a better approach. So I love the visualization piece, even just the blocking aside, I think the visualization is extremely important there. Thanks. I forgot, the other part in there is per website you can click on manage trackers and you actually see the names of the companies that have third party tracking on the website that you're visiting.

So it's like, hey, I was just trying to get a recipe for tonight's dinner. Why is X company trying to siphon off my data here? And so you actually see full names of companies that are on there, which otherwise the tracking is just so black box and you have no idea. This really does make it very readily available for someone to understand who is tracking them and what's going on behind the scene. Yeah, and understand the scope with which companies like Google and Facebook are both notorious for having tracking or analytics built into

40:00 websites all across the internet, seeing how pervasive their tracking tools are in sites that have nothing to do with Google or Facebook or anything close to them. But even then, their fingers are in there as well, trying to track the things that are going on. What limitations should users be aware of when using Startpage Privacy Protection? I mean, so it is protecting people from third-party tracking, not necessarily first-party tracking, which is a big deal. First-party tracking is where a lot of future tracking is moving towards.

And that is why you do need to look out for the big tech behemoths. Because from Amazon to Facebook, they've created these worlds, these ecosystems where they're creating first-party data opportunities to track people. So the extension won't protect you from first-party tracking. That is definitely a limitation people should be aware of. And you mean first-party tracking in the sense of like, if you go to amazon.com, even if you block the other trackers that are built into amazon.com, Amazon obviously has visibility into the things that you do on that webpage because they own the webpage. That's the way you're kind of referring to first and third-party privacy.

Exactly. And then they can use that data about you to sell advertising to advertisers through Amazon's own advertising network. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Just wanted to make sure that I understood the lingo you're using there for sure. That's a good clarification. So also how does, and I'll just shorten it to SPP to save some breath, but how does SPP compared to other similar tools? And I know there are differences here and we talked about it a little bit over email, but I think it's helpful for people to understand the differences and approach between something like SPP versus uBlock Origin, or I know DuckDuckGo has a somewhat similar extension called DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials. Would you mind kind of breaking down the differences there?

Sure. So with uBlock Origin, theirs is an ad blocker. So that tool can be used in conjunction and we recommend it to be used in conjunction with SPP. I like that new naming. I like it. I'm like, oh, can I get a t-shirt? But so yeah, so they aren't competitors so much as complementary products, uBlock Origin and SPP. So that would be sort of the main difference there. And then in regards to privacy essentials by start page, you know, both extensions are using the open source code from privacy badgers. So the level of cookie and tracker blocking that you're going to receive from both extensions is basically on par to the same thing. Interesting. Where the difference lies is their default search engine will be defaulted to start page, meaning you'll get Google search results in private. Whereas if you use privacy essentials, your default search will be switched to DuckDuckGo, meaning you're going to receive their private search results from Microsoft Bing. And then the interface is different when it comes to start page privacy protection. We've chosen a grading system of one

to five. One meaning the lowest worst privacy practices and five meaning there is no third party tracking occurring. And we give those based on the true scoring of that website, not just on what the extension has improved that website to be yet. So you get that kind of true score. We also allow you to go in and click manage trackers. So let's say your extension is installed and you're on a web page and you're just not able to open certain pages or you're not getting the full functionality of that website. You can go in and change the manage tracking settings to block all, allow certain ones. And really that makes sure that like certain websites don't break just because the extension.

So you have a lot more control and power. And then lastly is the privacy report. So you can click in at any time to your extension in the top right corner is a little chart icon and it shows you the your privacy report, which is really fun to see. It kind of shows you value at the end of the week or day. You can check in whenever. I just popped into mine. I that I have installed on Firefox, which is the browser I have open right now. Since using start page privacy protection, I have blocked 13,000 trackers and 5,703 cookies. So I can look into this report whenever I want and it's just kind of like a fun reminder that like, hey, I installed this product completely for free and I can just already see the value that it's providing.

Yeah, it's like it's a great kind of gamification of privacy to let people kind of see some of the stats and fun details around how much has been done by that that extension. I think it's again, it's kind of looping back to the value of exposing those details to users so that they better understand the advantages that they're gaining from from using tools like this to help preserve their privacy online. So I love that that those metrics are bubbled up and bubbled up in a way that's kind of consumable by the average person and not something you have to have a PhD to to understand when you're looking at it.

So I think it's a it's a very important piece of tools like this. Oh, good. Glad you like it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've been enjoying it. I've started using it since we kind of chatted initially over email. It's been a good experience of kind of playing around with bouncing back and forth between it and my own Whoogle instance and other things. But it's been a been a good experience so far and if I'm going to keep exploring using it. But I do have a couple more questions for you. And the first one we've touched quite a bit actually on the the way that Startpage is funded, or at least we've we talked on how the actual search results provide funding for y'all through the the three ads at the top of each search result and how you pay Google for the search results.

Is there anything else you'd like to add on kind of how Startpage is funded or how y'all have made this approach to private search sustainable? Yeah, I touched on it in the beginning, but it's worth going deep on here as well. And that's really our commitment to contextual advertising versus behavioral advertising. So I'll start with behavioral, which is the bad one. Behavioral advertising really is the collection of people's data and then and then creating a profile around that individual.

So advertisers or politicians, you name it, are able to select interests and characteristics of a person and then target them with messaging. Behavioral advertising is a huge, huge industry. And it comprises of, you know, the big ad networks, data harvesters and and the likes. And really, it has become over the last decade or more the go to form of ad buying for companies and brands. And as you know, Startpage has been around for 15 years and we have only ever practiced contextual advertising, which we feel is a really privacy respecting way to advertise to people.

And the way that it works is if you're searching for a certain topic and a brand wants to deliver an ad for someone who is in that context, in that moment searching for something, we will deliver that ad. So if you're, you know, searching for vacations in a certain area and somebody has purchased that search query, ads for that will show. But not necessarily based on your previous search history or your previous browsing history. Yeah, and thank you for diving into that.

The details of that is a very important piece to understand how the advertising model, I think, can work in a way that's not invasive and that's not really preying on the data of individual users. I think it's a very interesting approach. And I mean, as someone who definitely does not like ads, I think a large part of that is something that's come from the behavioral targeting of ads. And how pervasive that has become on many other sites. So I definitely kind of thinking more deeply about your advertising model makes me kind of want to consider how if there is a path forward for advertising to be a good way to fund companies that care about privacy.

If that company is willing to take those steps like y'all have to to find ways to provide ads without actually preying on the user, collecting data, selling data, all of the other things that we kind of imagine or we don't imagine that we know are bundled with behavioral. And that's a lot of people targeting of ads by other companies. Yeah, the New York Times did an actual A/B test study on their own digital news site where they sold ads.

50:00 contextual ads to advertisers. So say they were writing an article on a certain topic and they said, you know, do you want your ads attached to these topics? Meaning if someone's, you know, looking at the recipe section and you want to sell cookware, um, you know, instead of any type of demographic information or behavioral information. And they found that they were able to make more money by selling contextual ads than signing up with these ad networks or, and or selling behavioral ads. So contextual can be profitable. Startpage has been profitable since inception for 15 years using contextual only. Um, we're happy to talk to any business that is considering which is the right model for them and really would love to be the kind of example that contextual does pay and you don't have to spy on everybody or sell their data to make money.

What a, what a unbelievable idea. You don't have to prey on people to build a profitable business. That's a great thing. Awesome. Well, last question that I have for you, Kelly, is just how can listeners jump in and support what you're doing with start page? Well, um, we love hearing from our users. Obviously we don't have any information about them, um, and what they're doing with the product. So if you're on Twitter, our handle is at start page. Um, if you want to email us, uh, please do at support at start page. So if there's a question you have about using private search or a feature or a need, we'd love to hear from you. Um, and, um, really it's all about raising awareness around privacy. So, uh, try to talk to your friends and family about the, their, the reality that there is an option for them and, uh, yeah, we'll just make the world a more private place together.

Awesome. Love, love those suggestions and thank you so much for, for coming on Kelly and kind of walking us through a lot of the details around start page, around the, the privacy search space, the, the complications and intricacies there. And, um, just love hearing about another business that is privacy conscious, that seems to be taking things very seriously, but has still found a way to be profitable and build up a business over the years. Um, so it's always great to hear that there are ways that businesses can be built while caring deeply about personal privacy. Um, so I hope that that space continues to expand and, um, definitely excited to keep trying start page myself and, and hope other people will kind of consider start page as an option for them. Again, consider it within their threat model and within the specific things that they care about, but, um, consider it as an option. So thank you so much for coming on and walking us through all those details. It's been a pleasure, Seth, and thanks

for giving us the opportunity and the space to do it. Absolutely. Kelly. Well, have a great rest of your night. All right. Thanks. You too. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of opt out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast, or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week, as always, you can check out the link to the guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode. Now get out there and opt out this week.