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The vast majority of free apps on Android have Google trackers.
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This is why people make claims that microphones must be listening to me.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome to Techlore Talks, where I invite on experts and other leaders in the field to talk about digital freedom, privacy, security, and digital rights.
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Today, I have Peter from DuckDuckGo, who's going to discuss the company's mission, how they try to provide privacy-focused search,
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how they compare to mainstream alternatives like Google and Microsoft Bing, their unique features,
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their stance on data collection, their broader ecosystem as a whole, like the browser and how
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it fits into the broader picture and their views of what privacy should entail, as well as their
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general demographic and why they really try to target the mass audience and how they plan to do
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that. DuckDuckGo is one of the biggest players in the space, and so I'm really excited to have on
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Peter to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at a company like DuckDuckGo. Let's get
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into it. Welcome, Peter. I have Peter on today from DuckDuckGo, if you don't mind just quickly
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introducing yourself a little bit and what you do. Yeah. Hey, Henry. Thanks for having me. So I'm
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Peter Dolansky. I'm at DuckDuckGo. I'm on the product team at DuckDuckGo. I tend to work on our
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browsers and our privacy protections at DuckDuckGo and sort of been working in the space of browsers
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and privacy for, I think, more than 15 years now overall. So I'm sort of steeped in it.
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Yeah, I saw on your LinkedIn that you were at Mozilla before DuckDuckGo. That seems like a pretty natural kind of selection of companies to work for. Do you mind expanding on how that came about?
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Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, going all the way back to just before Mozilla, I was always a Firefox fan early on. Obviously, it was a very, you know, one of the first sort of mission driven community sort of driven initiatives that got a lot of traction.
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a huge Firefox fan. I made an effort to try to join the team. I joined over Mozilla,
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spent eight years there, very much a proponent of their mission overall. I started in some other
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areas, but eventually took on product lead of Firefox Desktop, so Firefox for Windows, Mac,
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Linux, and then privacy and security areas of Firefox as well. And so I worked on a lot of the
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technologies, privacy technologies they have in Firefox.
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I know you've talked about some of them on your channel before, the enhanced track protection
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and a bunch of other capabilities in Firefox.
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And then after about eight years there, I got to know some of the DuckDuckGo folks.
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DuckDuckGo has always partnered with Mozilla in some way for DuckDuckGo search as part
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of one of the search options, of course, in Firefox.
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And DuckDuckGo team at some point convinced me six years ago to come work on privacy and browsers at DuckDuckGo.
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And I've been at DuckDuckGo ever since the last six years.
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Very nice.
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And then before we start diving into stuff, I just want to make sure people get to know you a little bit more.
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Sure.
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Director of product.
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I might hear that and go, okay, director of which product?
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What does it actually look like day to day?
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What are the decisions that you make?
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What is your role if you had to explain to somebody what you do day-to-day at DuckDuckGo?
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Yeah, let me first explain it a little bit by describing DuckDuckGo organizationally.
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I'm not the only director of products.
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We actually have multiple overall.
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We hire very senior, very well-rounded people that can work quite autonomously.
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We are a very flat structure.
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We're a small company.
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When I started, I think there were around 80-some odd employees.
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Over the last six years, we've grown out to about 400 or so.
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And we take on the tech, you know, Goliaths of the world.
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So we do a lot with a small team overall.
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We tend to have our product people kind of specialize in different areas of the product.
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Either some are more focused on the experience of the product and the onboarding of our applications and our browsers.
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Some focus a little bit more on, you know, the core browser technology or the privacy features of those browsers.
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That's a little bit where I spend most of my time. And then, of course, we have some working on new stuff like AI, our Duck.ai that we've launched pretty recently and is growing very quickly.
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So we have product people kind of specialize into these different areas, and they work day to day with engineers, designers, copywriters, et cetera, to decide sort of what features we're going to build.
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In the case of privacy, it's evaluating what threat models exist and which threats we want to specifically build capabilities for protecting users from.
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And so that will be defining those features, coming up with the projects that we're going to run, and then working with our counterparts on design or engineering to come up with prototypes, test them, play with them, adjust them, and then figure out how to launch those things with real users, and then collect feedback from users and iterate.
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And that's basically how we build our products, very much listening to what our users have to say.
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Either we go on Reddit, we go on social channels, we listen to users there, we engage.
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We do a lot of user research as well to interview people, understand their perceptions and what works for them and what doesn't,
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and use that to help shape basically what we're building in the product overall.
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Very nice. And then you're focused more on that privacy security development.
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Yeah, privacy and specifically browsers are browsers on desktop and mobile.
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Great.
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Okay, yeah, so I definitely want to touch on your ecosystem later on in the interview.
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We'll touch on the browsers.
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We'll touch on your new subscription that I know is new, how that integrates with DuckAI.
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But I want to start, you know, you brought up the big tech companies, and this is how I really wanted to open this interview was to, you know, someone.
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DuckDuckAI is a very well-known brand.
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I feel like it's a very unique name, very unique branding.
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You guys run billboards everywhere. It's one of the privacy companies that has penetrated, I think, the mainstream awareness very nicely.
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But I still think that a lot of people, they still use Google, right? They still use a lot of these very mainstream providers.
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And so I want to just start by asking you, what is happening when somebody is using Google on a daily basis?
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And what are you trying to offer as an alternative to that? And how do you inject yourselves in that equation?
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Yeah, so we can tackle that from a few parts. So maybe just a quick point on your, you know, most people use Google. Yes, obviously, Google from search is dominant 90 plus percent market share globally, multiple antitrust lawsuits against them.
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Pretty clear. Most people are very, very familiar with Google. To put it in context to your earlier point, in the U.S., DuckDuckGo search is the biggest non-Google search engine by volume on mobile devices specifically.
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So, yeah, I mean, we're hugely popular. A lot of people know us from search, and then we use that to foray into browsers, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.
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But so, yeah, to your point, a lot of people know DuckDuckGo.
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I'll pair Google and Chrome together because both of those, you know, the Chrome browser and Google search are heavily used by people worldwide.
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What is happening when people use these products is you basically on the other side of that have a company that is the world's biggest data collector that is using every tool at their disposal to collect information about you, your actual searches, of course.
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But, you know, behaviorally profiling you, collecting what websites you go to and deriving information from that.
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And they're using that to, you know, solidify their ad business model, which is entirely based on provided targeted ads based on these behavioral signals and everything else.
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And so it is just insane the level of data collection that they've actually been able to amass.
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And that tends to come from not only the data collection when you use Google search, but on almost all the websites on the Internet and almost all the apps on mobile phones.
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So, you know, the vast majority of websites on the Internet have Google trackers embedded in them.
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And the vast majority of Android free apps, we can talk about our app tracking protection that we have a little later.
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but we know this through our testing that the vast majority of free apps on Android, for example,
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90 plus percent have Google trackers in them. And these trackers are just constantly collecting
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all kinds of bits of information about you. And it's not just, you know, I think most people would
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assume it to be, oh, they're collecting that I'm into snowboarding or something that doesn't sound
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too nefarious. But it's actually, you know, much, much deeper than that. Like, you know,
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And apps, they're collecting whether or not you have headphones plugged in or not, your battery status on your mobile device.
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We've done a lot of research and sometimes working with newspapers on apps that are supposed to be health-related apps or health websites.
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And they are basically sending back details about prescription drugs, health conditions, and so on to Google and others.
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Google is just the biggest of them, but there are a whole bunch of other companies, of course, in the mix here.
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And so all of that is happening behind the scenes when you're using Google products.
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They don't prevent anyone else from collecting this information by default.
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And as a result, I think the manifestation of that that most people see is ads following them around online, often creepy ads, price discrimination, other things we can get into.
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But this is why I think most people make claims that microphones must be listening to me.
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And this is why I'm seeing all these ads following you around.
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And I don't dismiss that there could be some microphones and some home products that may be listening to you.
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But the vast majority is happening through this web of data collection.
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It's almost creepier.
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It's happening behind the scenes.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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It knows you just as well as if the microphone was recording the whole time.
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Exactly.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to say that.
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No, that's that. Yeah, I think I think that's the summary. And so that's the that is the experience that most people have.
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Now, like I said, most people see it in those ads following them around.
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And that's where they made sense, like something creepy is happening here.
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But they don't necessarily understand the details of it because it is so hidden.
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And that's what makes it, I think, so nefarious overall.
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It's just, you know, all these things are buried in terms and conditions that people obviously don't read when they install apps or agree to those terms when, you know, when they first start using them.
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And at the end of the day, it's just this treasure trove of data that's being amassed about them in so many places, which then has all kinds of downstream issues.
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Like, you know, then if you have data breaches and all these things, then your data gets out there.
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Then it can be used for phishing attempts.
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And it's just that it ends up being sort of a nightmare scenario.
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And so I think most people, unfortunately, are exposed to that when using, you know, a product like Google Search plus Google Chrome with the default settings and, you know, no extensions out of the box.
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Yeah, and I want to dive a little bit more into the technical side of how DuckDuckGo, you know, what does better privacy look like behind the scenes, what you guys can and cannot do.
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But just before then, I did have a quick question because I have been seeing a lot more awareness around privacy issues the last couple of years.
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It's not inherently a political question, but it is by nature political because we're seeing a lot more reports come out about government agencies that aren't going through legal due process to get data.
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They're supposed to go through a judge, they're supposed to get a warrant, and instead of going through that process, they're going to big tech companies that collect this data legally, like Google.
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They're requesting that data, and Google says that they have a process
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where they try to only give data they need to give up only in certain situations.
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But they're giving Google that control.
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So I've been seeing a lot more awareness around this
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because people are now concerned about who's actually requesting their data
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and if it's actually being requested legally or not.
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So I'm curious if that's something you guys are following,
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and if you just had any views, or if you've seen an uptick in DuckDuckGo usage
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as a result of maybe more of these kinds of concerns that people have.
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Yeah, a couple of different parts to that. One is we always see an uptick in installs and usage of DuckDuckGo whenever there's any sort of news that's semi-related to privacy.
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Everything from Cambridge Analytica style news events to changes in government to, as you described, practices of governments, that always results in an influx of people being interested in how might I do something to better protect my own personal information and data.
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And so, yeah, that's always been the case for many, many years overall.
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So yeah, I mean, DuckDuckGo has been increasing in popularity over the years to get us into this position where a huge percentage of people are using DuckDuckGo for search and also for browsers as well, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
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In terms of the specifics of government bodies requesting data, our position has always sort of been, we're not going to collect any of it and never put ourselves in a position where we have to give up any data about any user to anyone.
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And that's how we've built our business.
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And so, you know, I don't even think I'm not involved in our legal requests that we get,
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but I don't think the government bodies for the most part even bother with us because
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they know we don't have anything to give on our users.
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And so we follow it in so much as we know it leads to people being interested and worried
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about these things.
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And of course, we want to do what we can to protect people.
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But the best way to do that is simply don't collect that information to start with.
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don't build products that are based on harvesting of that data and selling and sharing that data and so forth.
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Therefore, yeah, from a brand perspective, that allows us to build trust with people overall.
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Very nice. And then there's a ton of things I was writing as you were kind of going through this.
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But just to start, if somebody uses Google, but they enjoy the user experience, they have no intention of moving to DuckDuckGo.
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Let's just start with that person.
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But I think we're going to go into the core differences here and what the limitations might be.
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What if someone just goes into their Google account and just selects, like, don't track me?
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I know Google has a few little privacy toggles that are very well hidden from users.
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But if a user just goes in and turns those off and then turns on incognito mode in their browser,
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what are still kind of the concerns that you would have in that scenario?
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Yeah, so there's a couple things.
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So there's like the Google search and what they collect via search explicitly.
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And, you know, I'm not even familiar with all the settings that you can and can't turn off there.
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A lot of companies obfuscate these things or change them a lot.
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But, you know, let's both presume that, you know, you can turn off sort of the use of the collection of your data through search and so on.
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And you are using incognito mode in Chrome.
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You still have all kinds of over signals that can be used as identifiers to track you.
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And so it doesn't prevent any third parties from necessarily doing that overall.
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You need to take it a step further.
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You basically need to actually block the trackers running on these websites outright to prevent them from collecting these things that would even be collected in an incognito context overall.
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Of course, incognito will do some stuff, right?
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Like it's not going to persist the cookies when you're done that incognito session.
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And so there might be some temporary identifiers that get blown away when you're done.
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So it's not nothing, but it just doesn't go far enough.
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And I think most people are under the impression that incognito is a mode that broadly protects your privacy on the Internet.
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And really, the reality is that it was really a mode that gives you a little bit more local privacy.
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So, you know, on your machine, someone doesn't see your browsing history and that sort of thing.
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Like, that's really what those things were designed for.
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And so, yeah, I mean, you're just open to all kinds of tracking that happens in non-key
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cognitive mode via fingerprinting, via IP address collection, you name it.
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There's a number of other techniques that are used there.
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Very nice.
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And then if we start diving more into DuckDuckGo, you know, let's just stick with search for
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now and we can slowly expand into the browser because the browser is going to be its own
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can of worms.
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But just, you know, in the search side of things, when someone does a search, they type in, hey, like, what's the weather today in San Francisco?
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If they put that into Google and then they put that in to DuckDuckGo, what is happening behind the scenes that is fundamentally different from a privacy perspective?
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On the Google side, I mean, I can only say in so much as like, you know, it's a black box.
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So who knows exactly what they're doing behind the scenes, right?
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But generally speaking, my assumption is that, you know, you send a search off to Google and it goes to their servers.
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They certainly collect the, you know, who did the search in terms of if you're logged in, which they very much encourage you to do, you know, by trying to auto log you in in Chrome all the time.
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They'll associate that search with your identity, presumably, and then use it later downstream for ads or whatever else in some way.
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I think that's the main thing that's an implication from a user perspective.
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Of course, there's the location aspect of it as well to enable local search results.
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In DuckDuckGo, there's a couple of different elements here.
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Of course, you may want local search results, in which case we would use your location and
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we try to provide clear options for the user there if they want to use the general location
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or more specific.
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And so there's some control the users have over that.
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But if you really want local search results, that's a needed element there.
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But on the DuckDuckGo side, the query comes to us and we basically we aggregate sources from a variety of partners.
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Of course, as you mentioned earlier, Microsoft and Bing is one of our partners.
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But we also have partners on hotel booking systems, sports score vendors, a plethora of other sources.
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And we have some of our own index as well.
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And so we basically use the combination of that data to serve you up some results just based purely on what that query includes.
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So nothing based on what you've historically searched for because we don't have that information.
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And that's the main difference.
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Whereas Google may use your historical information based on the connection to your identity to tailor results to you.
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And so we don't do any of that on our end. And you get you get the results that you get based on, you know, maybe based on your location, if that's included, and just what you have in the actual query.
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Got it. And then what kind of so far is that applies if you're logged into a DuckDuckGo account as well?
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We don't even have a DuckDuckGo account to log into.
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So that's so the things for your ecosystem are kept separate from the search.
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is what yeah and exactly so yeah there's no there's no duck.go account related to search
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we have like we have the ability to save search settings so that you know in a click a cloud saved
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thing it's not an account based that way if if you blow away your data on your browser your search
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settings don't get reset and that sort of thing but yeah we don't we don't have an account that
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is linked to search in any way the closest thing to accounts that we have is one on the subscription
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side, obviously, if you're paying for a subscription, there has to be some account.
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And it's usually done through, for most people, through Google Play Store or the App Store.
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Or on our sync, we have the ability to sync tabs and a bunch of different things across
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your mobile to desktop.
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That is also technically an accountless system.
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So we use QR codes and sync in between, but there's actually no account.
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But it's account-like in nature, which is why I'm mentioning.
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But yeah, related to search, there's no account.
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I see.
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I asked this in a recent, I don't think we've published it yet, but we talked about the concept of personalization.
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Companies like Google actually are quite proud that they keep this data over time.
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It's for personalization, it's to learn about you over time, and especially now with AI.
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As a consumer, there is potentially some more real tangible benefits.
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Potentially, right?
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If you ask, hey, Gemini, what's the weather near me?
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It might remember that last week you typed it in for San Francisco in Google search,
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so then it knows that.
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I'm sure it already knows that it doesn't need to do that,
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but it's just kind of a hypothetical example.
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What is your guys' relationship with this personalization?
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Do you still have any kind of personalization in a way that could be done
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in a privacy-respecting method?
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Or is this just something that users lose out on,
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or do you not see this as a loss?
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What is your relationship with this?
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Yeah, I think it's probably most useful to talk about in the context of the traditional search and then towards some of the newer AI approaches.
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So on traditional search, yeah, we don't think there's really any loss there for users.
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Apart from the local search results, you don't necessarily need to tailor search results based on historical stuff.
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We don't see really much tangible benefit for users overall.
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And that's why we've maintained that position that that's the approach we're going to take because we don't think there's any downside for the users.
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Now, on AI, to your point, I think there's different use cases are emerging where the utility may very well depend on some additional context.
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That is quite new in that a lot of people are trying to figure this out, us included, on how to do this in a private manner.
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There's different elements to that.
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There's like, you know, inevitably there's a bunch of model providers on AI that most, including DuckDuckGo, are partnered with or using, right, between OpenAI and some of the other ones.
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The sending, you know, IP address and personalized metadata to those companies isn't necessary for starting to provide more utility in chats and things like that.
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And so in fact, our Duck AI that we do offer, which you can access through any browser, but of course, it's also built right into our browsers optionally, and you can easily disable this.
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We basically proxy those connections.
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We strip off personally identifiable metadata so that the model providers don't get that information.
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And I think we're still in the forefront of figuring out beyond that, you know, what is the best way to deliver privacy without tradeoffs on utility?
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and that will include keeping context
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and building up context based on the types of use cases.
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Some of that may include in the future local models for things.
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We're still in the pretty early stages of figuring a lot of this out.
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So I'm sure you'll hear a lot more from that to go on that over the coming months.
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Very nice.
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And then just to lock in a couple more privacy,
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more technical privacy things before I zoom out a little bit more about broad search
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and then we can go to the other ecosystem stuff.
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If I was to become a DuckDuckGo employee and I was to get access to your server and I was to look at what data you guys have on every search query.
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Yeah.
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What does that look like?
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Just so people can get an understanding of what data is collected about them when they're using the search.
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To be honest, I probably couldn't give you the detailed answer on that with certainty because I don't work directly on search.
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But, you know, at a high level, it is pretty much mostly the query itself.
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Right.
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And then there is some data in there that's used for fraud detection.
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We have, you know, we basically our attention policies and everything are such that we delete things as soon as possible.
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But I couldn't give you the specifics of exactly what's, you know, associated with those queries overall.
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But like what I'll say on this stuff, I'm a little bit more familiar with on sort of the browser side and so on, in terms of usage metrics and things like that.
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We don't have any identifiers per user whatsoever.
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So at most, we collect interaction data, like how many clicks happened on a certain button and things like that at a very high level.
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And so, yeah, I mean, most other browser vendors are collecting unique identifiers per user, even if they're not tied to an explicit identity, like an email address.
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We do not even collect that level.
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And we have ways of making sure that, you know, we purge data pretty quickly.
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And so it never gets to the point where there's, you know, small groups of users, even though there's not really personally identified the data to start with.
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We want to make sure that there's no way for us to start to session users based on some attributes about the bits of data that we do collect.
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And so we minimize that and have very strict policies on it.
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This might also be maybe a little out of your wheelhouse, but I wrote it down.
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There's been some talk in some regions about age verification on the search engine level.
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which is quite fascinating.
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Horrible idea, in my opinion.
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But I'm curious if that's something you guys are at least aware of or following.
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Yeah, we are aware of it.
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Again, I'm not the most familiar with it.
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But my understanding in hearing from our policy folks is that I don't believe it applies to DuckDuckGo.
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I think it may be different per country and there may be some nuances that I'm not familiar with.
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But my understanding is it only applies, you know, to maybe search engines of a certain size or something.
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There might be some requirements around it, but I'm not 100 percent, you know, up on all the details of that.
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But my understanding is that something we're not needing to worry about at this point in time.
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Got it. And so I do want to ask about open source, kind of your views on open source and what is and isn't open source in the DuckDuckDuck ecosystem.
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But I guess maybe as a part of that, you guys are still the default search engine in Tor, the Tor browser, which is quite a high threat model tool for people to be using.
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It's not your average person.
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It just boots up the Tor browser on a daily basis.
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And that also, by extension, I think means that on Tails OS, I think DuckDuckGo is also the default, if I'm not mistaken.
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So what is the overall threat model and the posture?
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Like, who does DuckDuckGo really serve from a privacy angle?
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And then how does kind of open source fit into that for you all?
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I mean, we serve multiple user types, of course, but the way we look at it and think about it is anyone who's, you know, caring, basically cares and has some propensity to act on their privacy are the types of people we want to serve.
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And that, like, if you look at the people today that use specific browsers with all kinds of settings change and have multiple extensions layered on, like, those are not the primary people we're going after.
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Of course, we want our tools to work really well for them as well.
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But we are going after the people who don't know what to do.
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And I've sat in literally hundreds of user research interviews on the average consumers.
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And most people fall into this sort of bucket of like they're getting creeped out by ads falling around.
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They have some notion that all kinds of data is collected about them that there shouldn't be.
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They want to do something about it, but they don't know what to do.
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And so those people, they will never, you know, install a browser where they have to go change 20 settings and go install three extensions.
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Like that is a little bit too hard for most people.
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And so we are trying to basically be, we've often talked about it as the easy button for privacy.
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Like just install DuckDuckGo.
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Our defaults are what you want.
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They will take care of you.
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And we will do our utmost to protect you on search, when you browse on other websites, in other apps, and so forth.
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So that's the sort of broad audience of people that we're trying to cater to overall.
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And so that's like, you'll see that manifest in our product.
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We try to keep it simple, clean interface, easy to use.
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Our fire button in our apps can delete anything quickly.
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People love it.
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People love tweeting.
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They love changing the animations and everything on it.
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Yeah, that's the sort of thing that we want to deliver that really appeals to people.
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At the same time, really living up to that brand promise of actually protecting you behind the scenes.
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A lot of other companies engage in what I'll describe as sort of privacy washing, where we're private, we keep your information private.
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They sort of often mean we'll keep it private to us and won't share with others, but we'll use it quite a bit.
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We really try to live up to that privacy reputation in behind the scenes, often not observed by the user overall.
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But those are the sort of people that we're really trying to cater to.
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Yeah, and I think it's important.
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There's definitely a more maximalist privacy posture that you can have.
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And I know a lot of our audience is very much into that camp as well.
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But I don't think that people should need to have maximal privacy and have to do even all the things that we talk about on this channel.
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which is ironic, but people shouldn't have to go through all of that to at least get a nice major upgrade in their day-to-day life.
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And I feel like that is where services like yours are really good.
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Swap in, like getting everyone in the world from Google to Duck.Go is fantastic.
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And it's kind of also, maybe we can talk about this later,
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but ecosystems and suites also kind of have this negative association in more of the maximalist community
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because people don't want to put all their eggs in one basket.
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Proton gets kind of similar flack for that.
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But the reality is most people like and enjoy
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and have the convenience of an ecosystem
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and getting them from one ecosystem to another
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that has end-to-end encryption,
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that better respects them,
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is typically a huge win on a mass level.
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Just injecting my own opinions there.
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I don't know if you have anything to say to that.
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Yeah, yeah, a couple of neat things.
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This approach that we've taken to sort of cater to
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the average person that just wants
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you know, the privacy, basically, day to day, it seems to resonate. Like, you know, our obviously
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I've mentioned our search and how much it's used earlier, even our browsers on iOS in the US,
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we are the most popular browser on iOS devices other than Safari, obviously, which is included
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and Chrome to the earlier point, you know, right in the coattails of Google search.
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We are the most popular browser by usage on iOS. And so people are really drawn to it overall.
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And to your point, like, yeah, I mean, I think it's great that there are a whole bunch of tools out there.
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Tools being extensions, other browsers that have maximalist approaches.
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I think it's great. And people, if they know how to use those things, by all means, like, you know, use these tools.
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What we have found is that when some of those tools are adopted by people with a little bit less know-how, they become very problematic.
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Right. Like like an example might be something like you block origin, you block origin, super popular ad blocker.
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You know, obviously player benefits to users in terms of, you know, no ads on a lot of things.
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Now, a lot of people we've interviewed have that I've tried it have said, but it causes all kinds of website issues and breakage for them.
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And they have to often switch browsers entirely just to make the web work on certain websites and that sort of thing.
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And that's a hard problem to solve.
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Ideally, you would not have that problem.
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And you could take a maximalist approach to everything.
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But the reality is the web can be broken if you go a little bit too far on some knobs overall.
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And so we really try to take a maximalist approach until the point where it forces someone to go use a privacy invasive product because that defeats the entire purpose of it overall.
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And so we spend a lot of time and investment in people looking at, you know, breakage reports on websites, making sure that, you know, we have anti-finger fingerprint protection, making sure we don't go slightly too far, like Tor level far will break all kinds of stuff.
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And so it's hard to get that balance right, but that's essentially what we strive for.
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Yeah, and it's very necessary.
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And again, it doesn't need to take the place of the more advanced tools, which I know we're also big fans of and our community also very much enjoys.
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But if the only options were those hardcore tools,
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I don't think it would be good for the ecosystem.
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So it's important.
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I have a few more usability questions about the search.
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I know you're talking about the search a lot,
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and your main thing isn't even the search, it's the browser.
375
00:32:46,790 -->
00:32:48,700
So we'll get into the browsers in a second here.
376
00:32:48,800 -->
00:32:52,020
How did you guys get DuckDuckGo search in iOS settings?
377
00:32:52,460 -->
00:32:54,960
Because that is impressive, right?
378
00:32:55,080 -->
00:32:57,620
Apple gives you five options, tops.
379
00:32:59,300 -->
00:33:00,680
Yeah. So I'm curious how that happened.
380
00:33:01,320 -->
00:33:03,860
So that that is before my time, if I'm honest about it.
381
00:33:04,680 -->
00:33:07,680
So, yeah, I think that happened before six years ago.
382
00:33:08,220 -->
00:33:10,700
So all I can tell you is the high level there.
383
00:33:10,940 -->
00:33:23,000
You know, certainly I think folks at DuckDuckGo, including our CEO or small company back then, you set up partnership discussions with Apple and we, you know, talk to Apple quite a bit.
384
00:33:23,040 -->
00:33:35,660
A lot of this actually came up quite a bit in the recent Google antitrust lawsuit where there were depositions and discussions with Apple and Google on these default questions.
385
00:33:35,930 -->
00:33:41,300
And so there's actually a public record you can see of our CEO talking about some of those conversations with Apple.
386
00:33:41,840 -->
00:33:47,900
But my understanding is we basically said to Apple, we have the search engines growing in popularity.
387
00:33:48,460 -->
00:33:51,540
We were starting to get a sort of a cult following at that point already organically.
388
00:33:51,860 -->
00:33:56,320
And we basically petitioned Apple through these conversations to include us.
389
00:33:56,700 -->
00:33:59,080
And there was obviously just some decision made to do that.
390
00:33:59,140 -->
00:34:07,200
I don't know the details of what that decision included overall and why they specifically chose us.
391
00:34:07,520 -->
00:34:14,399
But certainly that helped in the early days in terms of awareness overall and building it out.
392
00:34:14,720 -->
00:34:19,620
And then since then, I'm not actually familiar with how Apple's done it since then in terms of what's included in those lists.
393
00:34:20,020 -->
00:34:23,800
But some of the other browsers, they do sort of regional popularity lists.
394
00:34:24,220 -->
00:34:30,399
And so I think they publish this as part of their repos, where they basically list out,
395
00:34:30,899 -->
00:34:36,120
here are the top N search engines that we will include in our list based on popularity per country.
396
00:34:36,330 -->
00:34:45,760
And so based on the organic usage of DuckDuckGo per country, we end up being in the list in Chrome in most places overall.
397
00:34:46,240 -->
00:35:06,320
Very cool. Yeah, it'd be awesome if Apple just allowed custom search engines. Maybe the EU will make them do that. Revenue, ads. You guys run ads in the search. So, you know, we were talking earlier about how Google runs ads and the concerns around that. So what is different about your approach here?
398
00:35:06,880 -->
00:35:23,700
You're absolutely right. We run ads on our search results page. Those ads we are partnered with Microsoft on using the Microsoft Ad Network. So the idea being that an advertiser, if they want to purchase an ad, they just do it on the Microsoft Ad Network and some of those ads will show up on DuckDuckGo.
399
00:35:23,820 -->
00:35:36,280
The difference being that the query itself is really the only information that is used to determine which ad to serve, not some behavioral profile or historical information about the user.
400
00:35:36,530 -->
00:35:41,960
When you search for something in DuckDuckGo, if you see an ad, there's a little, you can learn more about it.
401
00:35:42,220 -->
00:35:45,860
And it sort of explains how our ads work overall.
402
00:35:46,160 -->
00:35:56,700
But the idea being that it's set up in a way that Microsoft cannot use information about our users to behaviorally profile or anything like that either.
403
00:35:57,110 -->
00:35:59,900
And so that those those ads are private for users.
404
00:36:00,550 -->
00:36:01,920
And that's that's really the main difference.
405
00:36:02,210 -->
00:36:08,180
Whereas, you know, Google ones, like I said, are tend to be based on whatever profile they've created about you.
406
00:36:09,140 -->
00:36:11,920
Yeah. And I think maybe that's the overall pattern here.
407
00:36:11,980 -->
00:36:15,980
is kind of the ephemerality, if that's a word, of this.
408
00:36:16,100 -->
00:36:20,940
Because the word I've heard in the past that describes how you run ads is contextual ads,
409
00:36:21,440 -->
00:36:28,380
which is the more maybe technical term for if you type in diapers into your search engine,
410
00:36:28,920 -->
00:36:32,180
that one search might be used to recommend you baby products.
411
00:36:32,540 -->
00:36:37,760
Because based on that search, it'll know, oh, maybe this person has a child on the way
412
00:36:37,760 -->
00:36:38,700
or has a child currently.
413
00:36:39,300 -->
00:36:45,360
Whereas Google might, from a search you did three weeks ago, start continuing to build a profile over time.
414
00:36:46,020 -->
00:36:55,900
So it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is what's being, quote, personalized and kept long term and built into a profile versus what is just here in the now.
415
00:36:56,130 -->
00:36:57,880
Is that a good reflection of that?
416
00:36:58,100 -->
00:36:59,200
That's a great reflection of it.
417
00:36:59,270 -->
00:36:59,400
Yeah.
418
00:36:59,660 -->
00:37:05,800
And the other thing I'll say is a lot of, you know, Google, Meta, these big data collector
419
00:37:06,100 -->
00:37:10,180
companies, not only do they collect data about you based on your website visits and searches
420
00:37:10,300 -->
00:37:15,940
in the case of Google, they also have lots of ways to collect data about you, even not
421
00:37:16,040 -->
00:37:17,060
even on the internet, right?
422
00:37:17,160 -->
00:37:21,100
Like, you know, you go to a store and buy something these days, you know, in most stores,
423
00:37:21,460 -->
00:37:23,780
what is the first question the cashier will ask?
424
00:37:24,160 -->
00:37:26,260
Can I have your phone number or email address, right?
425
00:37:26,420 -->
00:37:29,000
And it's like, oh, well, you'll get points or some reward system.
426
00:37:29,200 -->
00:37:44,480
It's like, well, that's the thing that enables them to collect one of those two identifiers, and they only need one, and then directly upload it to Facebook thereafter or Google and then advertise to you as their customer later.
427
00:37:44,780 -->
00:37:55,440
And so now you are seeing ads following you around on these sites or, you know, in the case of search ads could be based on literally something you did in person, nothing to do with what you did online.
428
00:37:56,200 -->
00:38:00,480
And people don't realize this happens and are freaked out by it all the time overall.
429
00:38:00,660 -->
00:38:05,120
And so, yeah, none of that happens on DuckDuckGo with respect to our search ads.
430
00:38:05,200 -->
00:38:08,840
It is just you search for a car, you'll get a car ad.
431
00:38:08,840 -->
00:38:10,800
You search for diapers, you might get a diaper ad.
432
00:38:11,680 -->
00:38:11,920
Got it.
433
00:38:12,120 -->
00:38:14,460
And then that's kind of the search end of the equation.
434
00:38:14,900 -->
00:38:18,420
So now we pivot over to kind of the other stuff you do.
435
00:38:19,280 -->
00:38:19,360
Yeah.
436
00:38:19,800 -->
00:38:23,920
This has, you know, because I've been running this channel now for over 10 years.
437
00:38:24,340 -->
00:38:26,120
And back then, it was just DuckDuckGo.
438
00:38:26,760 -->
00:38:28,120
I don't recall there being anything else.
439
00:38:28,170 -->
00:38:31,380
I remember when you guys released your apps for the first time.
440
00:38:32,500 -->
00:38:33,600
Then you released them for desktop.
441
00:38:34,240 -->
00:38:34,920
Now you have DuckAI.
442
00:38:35,390 -->
00:38:37,800
I think there's even a VPN now, if I'm not mistaken.
443
00:38:39,100 -->
00:38:42,340
So can you kind of walk me through this expansion over time?
444
00:38:42,800 -->
00:38:48,280
What you guys are choosing to expand to, why, and where you think your role is here,
445
00:38:48,370 -->
00:38:50,960
either for yourselves or the people who use DuckDuckGo?
446
00:38:51,480 -->
00:38:51,840
Absolutely.
447
00:38:52,070 -->
00:38:53,580
So we have the DuckDuckGo subscription.
448
00:38:53,980 -->
00:38:54,900
There's two tiers of it.
449
00:38:55,060 -->
00:38:57,140
There's a pro and a plus tier.
450
00:38:57,540 -->
00:39:01,280
Both tiers have the same basics in terms of privacy protections.
451
00:39:01,810 -->
00:39:06,920
So you get a VPN, you get personal information removal, which I can talk about in a minute.
452
00:39:07,300 -->
00:39:09,940
Is the VPN only in your browser or is it system wide?
453
00:39:10,680 -->
00:39:12,140
It applies system wide.
454
00:39:12,280 -->
00:39:14,960
It is in our browser apps.
455
00:39:15,110 -->
00:39:16,380
Like that is how we distribute it.
456
00:39:16,440 -->
00:39:18,220
We don't distribute it as a separate thing.
457
00:39:18,310 -->
00:39:22,460
Like you install our app that includes the VPN either on mobile or desktop.
458
00:39:22,840 -->
00:39:24,660
but it does apply system-wide.
459
00:39:24,680 -->
00:39:28,260
So it is not just for what happens in the browser overall.
460
00:39:28,280 -->
00:39:31,200
So there's a VPN, there's personal information removal
461
00:39:31,480 -->
00:39:33,600
to scrub your data from data brokers online.
462
00:39:33,960 -->
00:39:36,540
There's identity theft insurance in some countries
463
00:39:37,380 -->
00:39:38,620
for people that are worried about that.
464
00:39:38,920 -->
00:39:43,540
And then most recently, as part of DuckAI, our optional AI,
465
00:39:43,900 -->
00:39:48,220
you get access to more advanced AI models with a subscription.
466
00:39:48,900 -->
00:39:50,640
And the second tier in the subscription
467
00:39:50,660 -->
00:39:56,100
is to give you higher limits on some of those more advanced models, basically, overall.
468
00:39:56,400 -->
00:40:03,360
So the reason we went from search-free, browsers-free, all the privacy tools-free,
469
00:40:03,640 -->
00:40:10,700
to having the subscription is there are certain threat models, like IP address collection
470
00:40:11,280 -->
00:40:19,059
and some of this personal data removal, that are inherently expensive to actually deliver
471
00:40:19,080 -->
00:40:24,120
to people. Meaning with the amount of money we make from search ads and as a business,
472
00:40:24,840 -->
00:40:29,980
we couldn't afford to offer all of this for free to people. We wouldn't have a business essentially.
473
00:40:30,520 -->
00:40:35,940
So if you really want these more advanced protections, we made those a paid offering
474
00:40:36,570 -->
00:40:43,260
to make it a sustaining part of our business overall. But our general approach is we give away
475
00:40:43,770 -->
00:40:48,180
stuff for free. So as long as the business can actually support giving stuff away for free,
476
00:40:48,240 -->
00:40:52,680
because we want to deliver the widest set of privacy protections to people.
477
00:40:53,220 -->
00:40:54,760
As many people can get it.
478
00:40:55,150 -->
00:40:57,360
And so that's why your search is free, browsers are free.
479
00:40:57,720 -->
00:41:01,820
If you really want the VPN and the other capabilities, there's an annual fee.
480
00:41:02,020 -->
00:41:09,240
But we've bundled it together so that you get all those things in a low price per month or the year,
481
00:41:09,980 -->
00:41:13,920
as opposed to going and buying a separate VPN and separate other tools.
482
00:41:14,500 -->
00:41:16,580
It tends to be less expensive than doing that.
483
00:41:17,340 -->
00:41:20,260
Yeah, so I guess you kind of, that was going to be my next question,
484
00:41:20,640 -->
00:41:27,300
is where do you see yourself positioning this relative to somebody who wants to use this VPN?
485
00:41:27,940 -->
00:41:30,300
And maybe, I think you guys have email aliasing as well.
486
00:41:31,060 -->
00:41:32,160
So also email aliasing.
487
00:41:32,740 -->
00:41:32,980
That's right.
488
00:41:34,180 -->
00:41:38,880
Why would someone pick your ecosystem instead of picking those individual services?
489
00:41:39,060 -->
00:41:42,940
You just referred to cost there, but I'm wondering if there's kind of any other things.
490
00:41:43,540 -->
00:41:44,400
There's a couple things.
491
00:41:44,560 -->
00:41:45,760
So one is certainly cost.
492
00:41:45,860 -->
00:41:47,240
You get a bundle of all these things together.
493
00:41:47,580 -->
00:41:50,240
The email protection that you refer to is actually a free offering.
494
00:41:50,600 -->
00:41:52,920
That's not you don't need their subscription for that.
495
00:41:53,000 -->
00:41:54,180
That's just included in our apps.
496
00:41:54,480 -->
00:42:04,260
But basically, I think the primary reason for most people is sort of what we talked about earlier is most consumers out there don't want to deal with a lot of complexity.
497
00:42:04,520 -->
00:42:07,680
And we're trying to offer this all up in a simple, easy to use package.
498
00:42:07,980 -->
00:42:14,820
So if you use our browser, you have the email protection, which allows you to do email aliases, builds right in.
499
00:42:15,280 -->
00:42:17,660
You know, when you're filling out forms, you can just click right there.
500
00:42:18,200 -->
00:42:20,160
You know, it generates the ELAS email for you.
501
00:42:20,580 -->
00:42:22,600
VPN buttons right there, apply system wide.
502
00:42:23,120 -->
00:42:28,880
The personal information removal part that I mentioned earlier, that is the way we design.
503
00:42:29,020 -->
00:42:29,560
That's really cool.
504
00:42:30,080 -->
00:42:39,020
Basically, that's like if you have all these data brokers that collect your information, a lot of them provide opt outs where you can go fill out forms and request that they delete your information.
505
00:42:39,540 -->
00:42:40,780
We do that on your behalf.
506
00:42:41,480 -->
00:42:49,840
Now, most other services that offer something like this, they have to collect all this information about you so that they can go request deletion of these things on your behalf.
507
00:42:50,480 -->
00:42:53,460
We actually do it so that runs locally on your computer.
508
00:42:53,780 -->
00:42:55,320
DuckDuckGo doesn't collect that information.
509
00:42:55,660 -->
00:43:03,480
And so your computer in the background and your browser while it's running will go and request that all these data brokers delete your information.
510
00:43:04,400 -->
00:43:09,260
And so it's really designed in this private way where you don't need to send us anything.
511
00:43:09,450 -->
00:43:13,120
To my earliest points about us not wanting that information from you.
512
00:43:13,450 -->
00:43:22,600
And so that's what we're hoping that that package really appeals to people who want all those capabilities at a really competitive price overall.
513
00:43:23,220 -->
00:43:31,120
Very nice. I need to do more research in your data removal service because, you know, of all of them out there, I know it's I'm sure you all saw the Consumer Reports research.
514
00:43:31,270 -->
00:43:34,180
And so the efficacy of them is quite all over the place.
515
00:43:35,140 -->
00:43:38,120
Easy Opt-Outs has been consistently a really easy recommendation
516
00:43:38,470 -->
00:43:40,160
because it's, I think, $20 a year.
517
00:43:40,420 -->
00:43:41,440
And they do a good job.
518
00:43:41,540 -->
00:43:42,840
They were found to do really well.
519
00:43:42,840 -->
00:43:43,900
It's what I'm using right now.
520
00:43:44,340 -->
00:43:45,840
But the idea of using something locally
521
00:43:45,980 -->
00:43:48,240
is always a little bit more enticing to me.
522
00:43:48,310 -->
00:43:51,320
And I think I had redact.dev on here as well,
523
00:43:51,420 -->
00:43:53,220
and they teased that they were working on something similar.
524
00:43:53,520 -->
00:43:55,460
So I need to do a big deep dive on these
525
00:43:55,570 -->
00:43:57,260
because I think that could be the future of this.
526
00:43:57,410 -->
00:43:58,660
And I think you guys already have it.
527
00:43:58,800 -->
00:44:00,820
So it's something I need to dig into.
528
00:44:01,100 -->
00:44:01,800
Regarding your browser,
529
00:44:03,260 -->
00:44:06,040
I'd like to dive into a little bit more of the technical aspects of this.
530
00:44:06,300 -->
00:44:09,420
So is your browser designed to only be an ephemeral experience?
531
00:44:09,770 -->
00:44:12,200
Meaning, for anyone listening, I know your mobile app,
532
00:44:13,780 -->
00:44:15,100
you might log into five services,
533
00:44:16,219 -->
00:44:18,620
but I think even by default, maybe?
534
00:44:18,790 -->
00:44:20,540
Or at least the fire button kind of implies
535
00:44:20,660 -->
00:44:22,960
when you're done with your session, you're done with your session
536
00:44:23,080 -->
00:44:24,460
and you have to log into those services again.
537
00:44:25,080 -->
00:44:26,780
Is that the only use case you have for it?
538
00:44:26,860 -->
00:44:29,760
Does desktop change your use case for the browser?
539
00:44:29,980 -->
00:44:35,620
I'd love to hear a little bit more about just the overall place that you see your browser being in people's workflows.
540
00:44:36,490 -->
00:44:38,940
Yeah, so the short answer is no.
541
00:44:40,100 -->
00:44:45,080
We intend our browsers to be your everyday primary use browser.
542
00:44:45,460 -->
00:44:54,720
Now, where we started years back on mobile was probably fair to say a little bit more ephemeral in that we didn't have a lot.
543
00:44:54,720 -->
00:44:57,160
There was a lot of browser capabilities we never used to have.
544
00:44:57,540 -->
00:44:59,960
I think at some point, I'm not even sure we had bookmarks in there.
545
00:45:00,370 -->
00:45:02,940
Like there was a bunch of, you know, it was much more ephemeral.
546
00:45:03,540 -->
00:45:05,800
And on mobile, that's a little bit more understandable.
547
00:45:06,000 -->
00:45:12,280
Because if you think about mobile use cases on a browser, it's often like you're like click a link to read an article and like you're done with it, right?
548
00:45:12,440 -->
00:45:15,380
Like you never care about saving that and coming back to it.
549
00:45:15,450 -->
00:45:16,440
Or that's the exception.
550
00:45:17,380 -->
00:45:23,740
And over time, of course, people started to do more and more things with their mobile devices and started to use them for purchasing and things like that.
551
00:45:24,060 -->
00:45:26,880
So we've sort of evolved the browser over the years to be,
552
00:45:27,560 -->
00:45:30,940
hey, if you want to use it in an ephemeral way, great, easy to do that.
553
00:45:31,220 -->
00:45:32,160
The fire button's there.
554
00:45:32,980 -->
00:45:35,980
But we've now really built out many more capabilities,
555
00:45:36,260 -->
00:45:40,740
including data syncing so that you can use it as your everyday browser.
556
00:45:41,040 -->
00:45:45,240
On the fire button, to your point that it would blow away cookies
557
00:45:45,660 -->
00:45:47,260
and session data and things like that,
558
00:45:47,740 -->
00:45:49,819
we have started to make that more configurable
559
00:45:50,420 -->
00:45:55,520
without making it harder to use for people who do want to use it in an ephemeral way.
560
00:45:56,600 -->
00:46:00,360
We have started to, and you'll start to see this on our mobile devices first,
561
00:46:01,380 -->
00:46:03,060
as well as our Mac browser, we have this out now.
562
00:46:03,520 -->
00:46:08,120
You can, instead of clearing all your data, you can clear data just for one tab, for example.
563
00:46:09,080 -->
00:46:10,700
And so we give some optionality there.
564
00:46:11,360 -->
00:46:14,680
While, like I said, still easy access to clear everything if you want.
565
00:46:15,040 -->
00:46:18,100
We also have the notion of what we call fireproofing.
566
00:46:18,220 -->
00:46:25,260
And that allows you to basically denote, hey, these are websites that I want to maintain sessions on.
567
00:46:25,360 -->
00:46:26,140
I want to save.
568
00:46:26,360 -->
00:46:27,740
I don't want to blow away all the data.
569
00:46:28,200 -->
00:46:30,140
And so you can fireproof websites.
570
00:46:30,620 -->
00:46:35,960
And so when you do use the fire button, it will keep some as an exception overall.
571
00:46:36,160 -->
00:46:43,520
And so we see sort of a, not quite a bimodal distribution, but the distributions of different types of usage.
572
00:46:44,200 -->
00:46:46,780
Some will use it in this sort of very ephemeral way.
573
00:46:47,280 -->
00:46:52,480
But many, many of our users use it as their primary day-to-day browser overall.
574
00:46:52,850 -->
00:46:57,120
Because I think the reality is that if you look at browser usage, including on desktop,
575
00:46:57,510 -->
00:47:02,440
a lot of people actually have more than one browser, and they've historically segmented their usage.
576
00:47:02,760 -->
00:47:11,060
Often that segmentation is like work versus personal or maybe like, you know, based on use cases or multiple accounts.
577
00:47:11,210 -->
00:47:12,680
You want to have to be logged in simultaneously.
578
00:47:13,180 -->
00:47:18,600
Or people who have been doing that with incognito mode or private browsing mode as well.
579
00:47:18,870 -->
00:47:25,120
And we're basically trying to have it so that you can just use it every day, but we still enable these other use cases.
580
00:47:25,600 -->
00:47:37,440
And so at first, we actually didn't have a separate sort of incognito mode equivalent because our thought process was, well, if most people are using incognito when they want to be private, ours is entirely private by design.
581
00:47:38,160 -->
00:47:46,060
But, you know, some people really wanted that because they were using it to log into another account or something that wasn't specifically about privacy.
582
00:47:46,290 -->
00:47:57,720
And so we started introducing what we call Fire Windows, you know, which is equivalent for the sort of local privacy being able to segment use cases on desktop.
583
00:47:58,340 -->
00:48:02,300
And we are experimenting with that version of that on mobile right now.
584
00:48:02,480 -->
00:48:08,120
And so you'll see it's more and more moved to satisfying really any type of use case people want.
585
00:48:09,640 -->
00:48:13,220
Nice. And so what's the underlying technology for your browsers?
586
00:48:13,740 -->
00:48:15,400
You know, we have we have Chromium based browsers.
587
00:48:15,580 -->
00:48:18,320
We have Gecko based, which is Firefox based browsers.
588
00:48:18,600 -->
00:48:19,560
What's your approach on different?
589
00:48:20,180 -->
00:48:22,760
I think it's different on different operating systems, if I remember correctly.
590
00:48:23,460 -->
00:48:29,840
That's right. So the approach is essentially to build on top of what is made available by the platform.
591
00:48:30,540 -->
00:48:33,600
And that's what we did on mobile historically.
592
00:48:33,730 -->
00:48:40,700
Like everyone's in the same boat there on iOS devices, you know, because Apple doesn't allow for different engines.
593
00:48:40,930 -->
00:48:47,800
There might be some EU rules that might change that somewhat, but I haven't seen any strong evidence for that actually happening.
594
00:48:47,970 -->
00:48:51,220
On Android, we do the same sort of thing we built on the Android WebView.
595
00:48:51,900 -->
00:48:59,180
And then on Mac, when we started building our Mac browser, we could use a lot of the tech we built for iOS and use it.
596
00:48:59,300 -->
00:49:01,620
You build it on the Mac WebView that's available.
597
00:49:01,820 -->
00:49:04,020
And we're partnered with Apple there as well.
598
00:49:04,160 -->
00:49:14,800
So meaning, you know, we feed that we give Apple feedback on on the underlying APIs and they have they've added capabilities and things that we requested over time.
599
00:49:15,120 -->
00:49:16,380
So is it WebKit for macOS?
600
00:49:16,680 -->
00:49:17,120
Yeah, exactly.
601
00:49:17,400 -->
00:49:21,940
So it would be underlying the web view is WebKit for both iOS and macOS.
602
00:49:22,240 -->
00:49:26,280
And then so, yeah, Android is on the Android web view, which is, you know, underline that is Chromium.
603
00:49:26,660 -->
00:49:38,520
And then on Windows, it's very similar to Android in that we actually have our own web view layer that we've built that we've just recently rolled out.
604
00:49:38,980 -->
00:49:42,600
But underlying that is Chromium overall.
605
00:49:43,160 -->
00:49:43,580
What about Linux?
606
00:49:44,660 -->
00:49:47,000
We unfortunately don't have anything on Linux right now.
607
00:49:47,290 -->
00:49:49,480
There isn't anything like this for Linux, right?
608
00:49:49,680 -->
00:49:50,020
That's right.
609
00:49:50,340 -->
00:49:50,660
Yeah, yeah.
610
00:49:50,830 -->
00:49:53,740
So the approach does limit us on Linux.
611
00:49:53,810 -->
00:49:56,060
And yeah, a lot of people in the Linux community
612
00:49:56,220 -->
00:49:57,920
have been asking us for browser.
613
00:49:57,970 -->
00:49:59,640
We don't have one coming at this point in time,
614
00:50:00,490 -->
00:50:02,340
you know, sad to say for those folks,
615
00:50:02,540 -->
00:50:03,600
but maybe in the future.
616
00:50:04,080 -->
00:50:06,240
Yeah, I mean, I do think that is a genuine,
617
00:50:07,480 -->
00:50:09,260
I mean, it kind of represents the,
618
00:50:10,180 -->
00:50:12,279
I guess the countless options that people have on Linux
619
00:50:12,280 -->
00:50:16,740
because I can't imagine there being a central browser platform
620
00:50:16,980 -->
00:50:18,620
that's built into every Linux distro.
621
00:50:18,750 -->
00:50:21,340
So I think that is just a little bit of a limitation
622
00:50:21,530 -->
00:50:23,960
in how the Linux community has evolved over the years.
623
00:50:24,880 -->
00:50:26,760
But it would be cool if there was something like that.
624
00:50:27,560 -->
00:50:29,500
I know there's been some WebKit-based browsers on Linux
625
00:50:29,640 -->
00:50:30,500
that are quite fascinating,
626
00:50:30,690 -->
00:50:33,460
so maybe someday something like that would happen.
627
00:50:33,820 -->
00:50:34,640
Extension support.
628
00:50:34,790 -->
00:50:38,480
So you're relying a lot on whatever the platforms give you,
629
00:50:38,700 -->
00:50:42,300
So I assume there isn't a consistent extension experience is my guess.
630
00:50:43,080 -->
00:50:43,320
That's right.
631
00:50:43,740 -->
00:50:46,700
If you can probably tell the last time I used the DuckDuckGo browser was many years ago,
632
00:50:47,020 -->
00:50:48,900
back when it was probably a little bit more of an ephemeral tool.
633
00:50:49,020 -->
00:50:51,260
So I'm also asking for myself here.
634
00:50:52,680 -->
00:50:54,940
Yeah, extensions, you're absolutely right.
635
00:50:55,100 -->
00:51:00,680
In terms of the platform capabilities, there are some limitations that wouldn't allow us to just deliver
636
00:51:01,380 -->
00:51:04,340
the normal extensions that you might have on some other browsers.
637
00:51:04,720 -->
00:51:06,600
A lot of people have asked for this stuff.
638
00:51:06,820 -->
00:51:12,380
So we are looking at it and trying to determine if there's an approach that makes sense and works.
639
00:51:12,860 -->
00:51:23,580
The other element to this is, to my earlier point on, we are really trying to cater and deliver to the average consumer and take care of the threat models there.
640
00:51:24,040 -->
00:51:30,060
We also do very much have worries about the sort of threat model that comes with extensions.
641
00:51:30,520 -->
00:51:35,860
every month there's a new article about some extension that goes rogue and and collects the
642
00:51:36,160 -->
00:51:41,740
you know people's entire browsing history sells it or something you know and like that is just so
643
00:51:42,000 -->
00:51:47,020
easy for people to focus on themselves on to be clear like i'm not saying we purposely would want
644
00:51:47,020 -->
00:51:52,300
to limit user choice or anything like that we want to make sure that we can deliver for the experiences
645
00:51:52,500 -->
00:51:58,179
that most people want without introducing new threats and so like the way we're looking at is
646
00:51:58,200 -->
00:52:02,320
both from a, you know, is there something we could do to actually enable extensions, but could we also
647
00:52:02,560 -->
00:52:08,800
look at the use cases that extensions deliver and deliver on those natively without most people
648
00:52:08,960 -->
00:52:14,340
needing to worry about introducing some third party they don't trust overall. And so you'll start to
649
00:52:14,420 -->
00:52:20,200
see us experiment more, you know, in our native browsers with dark mode being applied to websites
650
00:52:20,760 -->
00:52:25,619
and like, because if you look at the top extensions, it's like ad blockers, which we already block
651
00:52:26,280 -->
00:52:29,260
any tracking-based ad that comes from a tracking domain.
652
00:52:29,430 -->
00:52:31,080
So we already act as an ad blocker.
653
00:52:31,400 -->
00:52:33,360
The tracker blockers is already covered by us.
654
00:52:33,860 -->
00:52:36,900
They're third-party password managers, of course.
655
00:52:37,340 -->
00:52:38,900
And of course, there is a gap there.
656
00:52:39,060 -->
00:52:41,200
There's a bunch of people that do use third-party password managers.
657
00:52:41,680 -->
00:52:43,600
But again, most people do not.
658
00:52:43,870 -->
00:52:45,280
Even though that they've been growing in popularity,
659
00:52:45,440 -->
00:52:47,480
most people use their browser as their password manager.
660
00:52:47,920 -->
00:52:52,820
So we've been heavily investing in making sure that our password manager built in works well,
661
00:52:53,100 -->
00:52:57,840
syncs across our browser, all that sort of thing, and making it way easier to import your data.
662
00:52:58,420 -->
00:53:03,000
We were one of the first browsers to introduce ability to import data on our mobile browser from,
663
00:53:03,360 -->
00:53:07,680
you know, Safari and from the Google Password Manager overall. And people love it. People,
664
00:53:08,060 -->
00:53:13,300
you know, are using that in our onboarding. And then extensions like dark readers and things like
665
00:53:13,460 -->
00:53:19,360
that. And so some of those things we will start to incorporate natively as best we can, because,
666
00:53:19,800 -->
00:53:21,280
yeah, you shouldn't need to rely on a third party.
667
00:53:21,900 -->
00:53:24,280
But we will have to look in the future
668
00:53:24,520 -->
00:53:27,020
for things like third-party password managers, of course.
669
00:53:27,820 -->
00:53:27,960
Nice.
670
00:53:28,160 -->
00:53:30,260
And on mobile, it's not as much of a concern
671
00:53:30,620 -->
00:53:33,120
because you have autofill that's built into the system.
672
00:53:33,400 -->
00:53:34,100
True, absolutely.
673
00:53:34,460 -->
00:53:35,960
So I guess it's more of a desktop concern,
674
00:53:36,180 -->
00:53:38,780
which frankly, I mean, that shouldn't be your guys' problem.
675
00:53:39,680 -->
00:53:41,580
It is quite unfortunate
676
00:53:41,740 -->
00:53:43,140
because I think autofill would just be better
677
00:53:43,160 -->
00:53:44,680
if it was handled on an OS level.
678
00:53:44,780 -->
00:53:47,959
I still to this day think that what Apple did on iOS
679
00:53:48,960 -->
00:53:51,880
is hands down the best version of password autofill
680
00:53:51,880 -->
00:53:53,560
because it works reliably in every app.
681
00:53:53,800 -->
00:53:55,580
There's no kind of preferential treatment
682
00:53:55,880 -->
00:53:58,180
that Apple gives keychain over other third parties.
683
00:53:59,000 -->
00:54:02,840
Rare Apple win for third-party services, I think.
684
00:54:03,020 -->
00:54:04,620
Yeah, on our mobile browsers,
685
00:54:04,780 -->
00:54:07,140
we have started to include the option,
686
00:54:07,240 -->
00:54:08,260
and it's right there on iOS,
687
00:54:08,720 -->
00:54:12,960
to use our password manager as a system provider there
688
00:54:13,480 -->
00:54:16,720
and tie into that system that Apple and Google have built.
689
00:54:16,960 -->
00:54:20,940
Just because, yeah, I mean, not everyone's going to be using like an Apple device on desktop.
690
00:54:21,230 -->
00:54:25,680
And so like that gives them some optionality if they really want to use ours instead overall.
691
00:54:25,900 -->
00:54:28,360
But, you know, of course, they can use the system one if they want.
692
00:54:29,180 -->
00:54:36,480
Very cool. And I wanted to just ask very, very broadly, actually, why did you guys opt for this like platform based system?
693
00:54:36,960 -->
00:54:40,440
Like why did you not do a Firefox fork or a Chromium fork?
694
00:54:40,650 -->
00:54:42,620
What were kind of the what's the philosophy here?
695
00:54:43,500 -->
00:54:46,740
A couple of things. One is, I mean, if I go back.
696
00:54:46,880 -->
00:54:53,020
historically, we were a very small company when we started on our mobile browsers. Like you're
697
00:54:53,130 -->
00:54:57,540
talking about one or two engineers, you know, total working on these things. And so pragmatically,
698
00:54:58,090 -->
00:55:02,180
it made the most sense. Well, as I said, everyone's in the same boat on iOS. We kind of have to follow
699
00:55:02,300 -->
00:55:07,380
that approach. But pragmatically, it made the most sense to not reinvent the wheel on some of the
700
00:55:07,520 -->
00:55:14,760
underlying capabilities. And as long as we could deliver on the features we wanted and the privacy,
701
00:55:15,060 -->
00:55:18,240
live up to our privacy expectations overall.
702
00:55:18,580 -->
00:55:20,260
And so we applied that same approach
703
00:55:20,400 -->
00:55:21,940
when we looked at desktop as well.
704
00:55:22,040 -->
00:55:25,840
Like, you know, can we use what's already there?
705
00:55:26,520 -->
00:55:27,960
Can we use like, you know,
706
00:55:28,000 -->
00:55:30,780
from a security patch and update perspective,
707
00:55:30,840 -->
00:55:33,900
the fact that like Apple's already handling that
708
00:55:34,200 -->
00:55:35,880
for the most part with OS updates.
709
00:55:37,060 -->
00:55:38,280
And so that you don't have this dual,
710
00:55:38,880 -->
00:55:40,340
you know, the OS has to be updated
711
00:55:40,460 -->
00:55:42,140
and the browser has to be updated
712
00:55:42,260 -->
00:55:43,740
to get certain security patches.
713
00:55:44,340 -->
00:55:46,760
So that was the approach we decided to take on Mac.
714
00:55:46,940 -->
00:55:48,560
And it's worked very well for us.
715
00:55:48,760 -->
00:55:53,360
By the way, it also allows us to do something like distribute in the App Store on desktop on Mac,
716
00:55:53,460 -->
00:56:00,160
where other browsers don't necessarily have that capability overall, unless they're doing something similar to us.
717
00:56:00,400 -->
00:56:01,840
On Windows, it was a little bit different.
718
00:56:02,380 -->
00:56:07,900
We originally started with using the WebView 2, which is available from Microsoft on Windows.
719
00:56:08,680 -->
00:56:11,060
But we certainly had some limitations along the way.
720
00:56:11,260 -->
00:56:13,720
And then we basically had to go a little bit different route.
721
00:56:14,080 -->
00:56:15,700
But the philosophy is the same.
722
00:56:15,940 -->
00:56:23,440
Don't reinvent the wheel for the things that are already solved for people elsewhere and build on top of that to deliver some of these capabilities overall.
723
00:56:24,410 -->
00:56:43,560
The cost of maintaining a fork of some of the other browsers and either inheriting some of the web compatibility issues on some of them or, you know, just maintaining that fork in other cases to make sure there's no privacy invasive aspects to it.
724
00:56:43,720 -->
00:56:45,820
We felt that that wasn't the right trade-off to make
725
00:56:45,870 -->
00:56:48,060
where we could go with this approach overall.
726
00:56:48,380 -->
00:56:50,800
But yeah, we'll see how it evolves into the future.
727
00:56:51,400 -->
00:56:54,900
This approach is working for us for this foreseeable future.
728
00:56:55,920 -->
00:56:59,620
Nice. Do you support passkeys in your password management solution?
729
00:57:00,140 -->
00:57:03,020
We not this moment.
730
00:57:03,320 -->
00:57:07,220
Well, we do, sorry, I should say we do on Mac and I think on iOS.
731
00:57:07,800 -->
00:57:11,239
On Windows, we do not, but we've got a project right now
732
00:57:11,260 -->
00:57:16,180
to look into, you know, enabling that properly. Like it does work in some context, but, you know,
733
00:57:16,230 -->
00:57:21,860
we want to see if we can store some of the passkeys in our password manager directly and, you know,
734
00:57:22,320 -->
00:57:27,540
enable that model for people. Very cool. Progressive web apps. Is that something that you guys support
735
00:57:27,570 -->
00:57:33,400
on desktop? We don't. We don't. No. Yeah. You know, honestly, it's the sort of thing where like,
736
00:57:33,780 -->
00:57:38,299
you know, I remember being involved in the early days of progressive web apps, you know, Mozilla
737
00:57:38,560 -->
00:57:46,500
And like, it seemed to have a lot of promise overall, but the adoption really hasn't been there to a huge degree overall.
738
00:57:46,790 -->
00:57:54,520
Like we even had a version of DuckDuckGo search as a progressive web app up until a couple of years ago, I think.
739
00:57:54,800 -->
00:57:58,320
It's a confusing model for people, unfortunately, at the end of the day.
740
00:57:58,480 -->
00:58:12,120
Like, for example, when we started offering a Windows app, browser app, and we had a progressive version of our search, we started getting all kinds of user feedback that was very confused.
741
00:58:12,360 -->
00:58:24,760
They would say things like they would be in edge using DuckDuckGo, and they thought that that was our browser, or the reverse was true, and they would complain that we blew away all their bookmarks.
742
00:58:25,500 -->
00:58:31,240
And there's all kinds of sort of user, you know, I think issues with understanding that model.
743
00:58:31,350 -->
00:58:34,380
So it's not something we've really thought so hard about enabling.
744
00:58:34,840 -->
00:58:40,540
I'm not going to say we wouldn't do it in the future, but it just doesn't seem like it's taken off to a huge degree.
745
00:58:41,440 -->
00:58:44,020
Right. And what about fingerprinting protection?
746
00:58:44,190 -->
00:58:52,460
You know, we have kind of like the Tor project and all that browsers approach, which is to blend users, make them look together so that websites can't, you know, tell each user apart.
747
00:58:52,780 -->
00:58:54,960
We have kind of Braves approach of randomizing fingerprints.
748
00:58:55,580 -->
00:58:56,860
Each time you boot it up, it's different.
749
00:58:57,200 -->
00:58:58,800
Do you guys have any protections against this?
750
00:58:59,340 -->
00:59:00,200
Yeah, we do.
751
00:59:01,060 -->
00:59:04,700
So there's, you know, there's a couple of different elements to this.
752
00:59:04,950 -->
00:59:11,000
Like one is there's a lot of fingerprinting scripts that are on our third party block list that we have.
753
00:59:11,250 -->
00:59:19,020
And so like, but we've actually blocked the tracking scripts from all kinds of known trackers, inclusive of these fingerprinting scripts.
754
00:59:19,440 -->
00:59:20,480
So that's like the first layer.
755
00:59:20,700 -->
00:59:24,720
Like a lot of other browsers that don't outright block tracking scripts, they only block cookies.
756
00:59:25,460 -->
00:59:26,340
They won't block this.
757
00:59:26,340 -->
00:59:28,180
We block this stuff outright first.
758
00:59:28,840 -->
00:59:45,760
And then we do override APIs as well, similar to what you're describing from others, where we might do some JavaScript injection on the page and override some APIs to sort of fool or obfuscate the user's fingerprint overall.
759
00:59:46,220 -->
00:59:54,360
The approach taken is a little bit different on each platform because like we because on iOS and Mac, we we use WebKit ultimately underneath.
760
00:59:54,770 -->
00:59:58,800
We inherit a lot of their anti-fingerprinting capabilities already.
761
00:59:58,940 -->
00:59:59,940
They're just baked into our browser.
762
01:00:00,720 -->
01:00:03,840
And so then, you know, there's a slight difference on how we do it on different platforms.
763
01:00:04,320 -->
01:00:09,220
But yeah, the idea is that we do try to override a bunch of these APIs.
764
01:00:10,280 -->
01:00:15,240
We do actually have on our website, if you go to DuckDuckGo.com slash compare dash privacy,
765
01:00:15,900 -->
01:00:20,680
we actually have a nice little comparison chart that shows the different protections we have
766
01:00:20,960 -->
01:00:24,680
relative to other popular browsers and extensions as well.
767
01:00:25,040 -->
01:00:27,800
You can compare our extension to other extensions that are out there.
768
01:00:28,520 -->
01:00:30,840
And each one of those has a learn more.
769
01:00:31,060 -->
01:00:36,180
And we have help pages that go into the detail of each of these protections and how they work
770
01:00:36,240 -->
01:00:39,560
and what the limitations are per platform and so on.
771
01:00:40,440 -->
01:00:45,960
Nice. And then something I forgot to double click on is, you know, what is open source in your ecosystem?
772
01:00:46,860 -->
01:00:52,520
Yeah. So we are big fans of open source. We generally open source most things.
773
01:00:52,840 -->
01:00:54,740
I mean, there's some things we don't open source.
774
01:00:55,280 -->
01:00:57,780
The search, we don't open source search.
775
01:00:58,160 -->
01:01:02,200
Search is a, you don't want it to become a gameable system, essentially.
776
01:01:02,700 -->
01:01:04,920
But browsers, we open source.
777
01:01:05,360 -->
01:01:11,000
The only one we haven't open sourced yet was our Windows one because we were doing some re-architecture.
778
01:01:11,060 -->
01:01:17,020
We were waiting on that first before we made it available open source, before we open sourced it and then changed a lot of it.
779
01:01:17,030 -->
01:01:18,500
And so we're actually almost through that.
780
01:01:18,640 -->
01:01:21,240
And so I expect we'll open source it before long.
781
01:01:21,440 -->
01:01:26,920
But yeah, you can see in our repo, most things we have are open source.
782
01:01:27,400 -->
01:01:33,020
And that includes a lot of our underlying capabilities that feed our privacy protections.
783
01:01:33,480 -->
01:01:39,960
We have our tracker radar, which is our crawling system that goes and figures out who are the trackers on the Internet.
784
01:01:40,380 -->
01:01:50,380
That data set that's produced there and all the open source aspects of that are actually used by a lot of academics for research and be actually a lot of other companies use it as well.
785
01:01:50,460 -->
01:01:51,440
Apple included.
786
01:01:52,380 -->
01:01:55,720
Very nice. And one of the things that's in your ecosystem that I haven't used yet.
787
01:01:56,000 -->
01:01:57,980
So I'm genuinely curious how it works.
788
01:01:58,160 -->
01:01:59,760
So you have this app tracking protection.
789
01:02:00,120 -->
01:02:03,780
This is, from my understanding, built into the browser, but it applies system-wide.
790
01:02:04,220 -->
01:02:10,960
I assume that you're going to be running some kind of VPN connection that blocks certain domains contacted by third-party trackers.
791
01:02:11,110 -->
01:02:12,520
Do you mind expanding how that works?
792
01:02:12,660 -->
01:02:13,220
Yes, absolutely.
793
01:02:13,290 -->
01:02:18,660
So app tracking protection is a feature on Android specifically in our Android browser.
794
01:02:18,940 -->
01:02:21,180
It is an optional feature, as you mentioned, it's free.
795
01:02:21,400 -->
01:02:24,640
It uses the VPN APIs on Android.
796
01:02:24,880 -->
01:02:28,960
So when you turn it on, you will have to give VPN permissions to our application.
797
01:02:29,700 -->
01:02:32,120
And it all operates locally on the device.
798
01:02:32,440 -->
01:02:35,960
So while it's using the VPN APIs, it's not sending data to DuckDuckGo servers.
799
01:02:36,620 -->
01:02:51,360
It is basically just forcing all the app traffic on your device to route through a VPN layer on the device where we can identify trackers and block requests to those trackers.
800
01:02:51,500 -->
01:03:11,060
And so just as we block trackers on the web for third parties that exist on websites, if a given app is communicating with third party known trackers and we identify those through testing that we've done, I mentioned earlier that most of the free apps on Android have embedded trackers in them.
801
01:03:11,180 -->
01:03:23,140
So we've done thorough testing and we come up with a block list, which we publish on our open source, and we block requests to those trackers if they're not owned by the same company as the app itself.
802
01:03:23,490 -->
01:03:28,800
Right. So that's where like if it's Facebook using the Facebook app, we're not going to block requests to a Facebook domain.
803
01:03:29,000 -->
01:03:35,200
But if you're like using some random other app and it's trying to communicate with Facebook to a tracking domain, we will block it.
804
01:03:35,300 -->
01:03:39,560
And the cool thing about it is it shows you in real time what's happening.
805
01:03:40,080 -->
01:03:45,180
And people are absolutely shocked by the level of tracking that happens.
806
01:03:46,000 -->
01:03:52,660
It is like, you know, I was actually just, I just turned this on this morning on my device after I reinstalled our app.
807
01:03:53,030 -->
01:03:58,500
So this has only been running, I'll just show you my personal Android device since, I don't know, maybe five hours today.
808
01:04:00,120 -->
01:04:05,220
Eight apps on my device have had 806 tracking attempts.
809
01:04:06,620 -->
01:04:11,340
You know, and if you dig into each one of those, it actually shows you the sort of bits of data.
810
01:04:11,420 -->
01:04:16,000
They're known to collect the trackers, headphone status and battery level and so on and so forth.
811
01:04:16,200 -->
01:04:19,260
And so when people see this, it's sort of a shocking eye opener.
812
01:04:19,580 -->
01:04:24,260
You go to sleep at night, you pick up your phone in the morning and you look in like over the last eight hours.
813
01:04:25,040 -->
01:04:29,480
There's been, you know, 5000 tracking attempts, which is quite insane.
814
01:04:30,200 -->
01:04:33,380
Yeah, I guess something you said that that has me curious.
815
01:04:33,740 -->
01:04:41,040
You mentioned how if somebody has the Facebook app on their phone, you're not going to block, you know, first party Facebook domains.
816
01:04:41,300 -->
01:04:46,700
But what if somebody has, you know, a calculator app that has Facebook trackers and they have the Facebook app on your phone?
817
01:04:46,840 -->
01:04:50,940
Is it granular enough to be able to distinguish which app it's coming from?
818
01:04:51,440 -->
01:04:57,120
Exactly. And this is why, by the way, we do not have it on iOS because on iOS that is not possible.
819
01:04:57,440 -->
01:05:02,320
On Android, it is possible. And so we can say the calculator app is trying to talk to Facebook.
820
01:05:02,720 -->
01:05:03,280
Don't allow it.
821
01:05:03,800 -->
01:05:05,720
Facebook app, trying to talk to Facebook, allow it.
822
01:05:05,900 -->
01:05:08,460
We kind of distinguish between first and third party.
823
01:05:08,690 -->
01:05:12,540
And we are able to do that at the VPN level on Android pretty readily.
824
01:05:12,810 -->
01:05:17,440
We have to basically map out who owns what apps and what tracking domains they own.
825
01:05:17,470 -->
01:05:22,380
And then just make sure to not block, you know, those that are owned by the same company sort of thing to avoid problems.
826
01:05:22,800 -->
01:05:26,700
And we also like, it'll apply to other browsers even if you have it on your device.
827
01:05:27,380 -->
01:05:32,340
However, by default, we tend not to turn that on because that's like in a browser context.
828
01:05:32,700 -->
01:05:42,180
Like if you're going to the Facebook site and then the Facebook site is trying to communicate with Facebook, we don't want to block those requests because that will, you know, break your experience in some way.
829
01:05:42,320 -->
01:05:45,320
And so by default, we have a set of apps that we don't enable it for.
830
01:05:45,460 -->
01:05:46,520
But we were transparent about that.
831
01:05:46,520 -->
01:05:49,040
You can click to see which apps it applies to you and you can override them.
832
01:05:49,040 -->
01:05:51,920
You could say, actually, I want it to apply to these other browsers.
833
01:05:52,740 -->
01:05:57,900
But it's honestly, I've been using it since we built a proof of concept six years ago.
834
01:05:58,759 -->
01:06:02,420
And I feel naked when I don't have it on my device overall.
835
01:06:02,500 -->
01:06:03,400
It's a really great feature.
836
01:06:03,750 -->
01:06:06,420
Yeah, it's a cool implementation for it.
837
01:06:06,960 -->
01:06:08,980
And I was going to ask why iOS wasn't a thing.
838
01:06:09,010 -->
01:06:10,580
So thank you for getting to that.
839
01:06:10,840 -->
01:06:19,400
I assume this kind of choice you made to distinguish between first and third parties is also why you didn't opt for just a DNS block list system.
840
01:06:19,430 -->
01:06:19,720
That's right.
841
01:06:20,140 -->
01:06:20,720
Yeah, exactly.
842
01:06:21,020 -->
01:06:26,000
I know others do provide a similar capability via DNS, but there's tradeoffs there, of course.
843
01:06:26,340 -->
01:06:29,660
And that's one of them that makes it really hard to avoid breakage.
844
01:06:29,740 -->
01:06:47,380
So either you cause a bunch of breakage issues, to my earlier point about not messing with people's day-to-day experience, which causes them to abandon it, or you have to water it down to the level where you just can't block a bunch of things because you fear that it's going to break stuff and then it's not as effective where it can be.
845
01:06:47,820 -->
01:06:52,680
And so this approach of doing it on device allows us to get a little bit more nuanced on that.
846
01:06:53,000 -->
01:06:54,320
Now, it comes with challenges.
847
01:06:54,710 -->
01:07:00,920
Like, we had to work through a lot of, like, there's a lot of Android phones will try to do, like, battery optimization.
848
01:07:01,320 -->
01:07:03,540
They'll wonder why our app is working in the background.
849
01:07:03,860 -->
01:07:08,020
And they'll try to, you know, cut against us and fight us and try to disable it.
850
01:07:08,440 -->
01:07:19,780
But we've been able to put in place, you know, detection of that where we can tell users, like, go turn off this battery optimization that Samsung's trying to apply to keep working and so forth.
851
01:07:20,340 -->
01:07:25,960
And we have a huge percentage of our Android users use it each day and they keep it on constantly.
852
01:07:26,320 -->
01:07:27,660
And they love it.
853
01:07:27,780 -->
01:07:29,340
People share screenshots all the time.
854
01:07:30,170 -->
01:07:36,460
It makes them feel protected as well because they can viscerally see it happening, unlike most privacy issues.
855
01:07:37,400 -->
01:07:39,420
Yeah, the visualization is really important.
856
01:07:39,540 -->
01:07:42,980
And over time, I've seen how for regular people, that stuff really matters.
857
01:07:43,720 -->
01:07:44,020
Absolutely.
858
01:07:44,400 -->
01:07:45,740
One other issue with DNS.
859
01:07:46,420 -->
01:07:48,800
I love DNS because that's how I do a lot of my blocking.
860
01:07:49,180 -->
01:07:49,340
Sure.
861
01:07:49,460 -->
01:07:51,140
But it's not going to block IP addresses.
862
01:07:51,430 -->
01:07:54,000
So if someone's going to contact an IP address directly,
863
01:07:54,010 -->
01:07:56,280
it's going to bypass DNS and it's not going to be blocked.
864
01:07:56,560 -->
01:07:59,960
Do you guys do any filtering on an IP address level as well?
865
01:08:01,120 -->
01:08:02,460
Specifically for app tracking protection?
866
01:08:02,460 -->
01:08:03,580
For app tracking protection, yeah.
867
01:08:04,120 -->
01:08:09,920
No, it is purely based on who's being contacted
868
01:08:10,240 -->
01:08:12,220
and is it a tracker domain or not.
869
01:08:12,670 -->
01:08:14,320
And if it is, we block it.
870
01:08:14,330 -->
01:08:17,838
So presumably we would block most IP address collection
871
01:08:17,859 -->
01:08:19,880
to those third-party trackers.
872
01:08:20,080 -->
01:08:21,779
But that won't, to your point,
873
01:08:21,980 -->
01:08:23,500
that won't, you know,
874
01:08:23,609 -->
01:08:25,380
the first party will still be able
875
01:08:25,380 -->
01:08:26,520
to collect your IP address.
876
01:08:26,589 -->
01:08:27,500
And that's where you would need,
877
01:08:27,830 -->
01:08:30,060
you know, an actual VPN functioning
878
01:08:30,420 -->
01:08:31,580
to help with that problem.
879
01:08:32,240 -->
01:08:32,480
Got it.
880
01:08:32,910 -->
01:08:34,120
I definitely need to ask, you know,
881
01:08:34,200 -->
01:08:35,140
about the elephant in the room,
882
01:08:35,900 -->
01:08:37,200
which was a few years ago.
883
01:08:37,600 -->
01:08:38,960
I know there was a lot of controversy
884
01:08:39,240 -->
01:08:41,200
over the Microsoft exception for,
885
01:08:41,620 -->
01:08:42,920
was it inside the browser
886
01:08:43,029 -->
01:08:44,359
or was the app tracking protection?
887
01:08:45,000 -->
01:08:46,839
Yeah, let me, I can speak to that.
888
01:08:47,000 -->
01:08:53,819
it was relative, it was related to our block list, right? So I mentioned we block third-party
889
01:08:54,339 -->
01:09:00,880
trackers in all of our browsers, and that goes above and beyond what most browsers do. Most
890
01:09:01,020 -->
01:09:06,299
browsers that claim to be privacy-protecting are just blocking cookies. So we were blocking
891
01:09:06,759 -->
01:09:13,298
cookies. We also were blocking the tracking scripts themselves. There was a requirement
892
01:09:13,319 -->
01:09:19,339
for Microsoft partners that Microsoft had in their contracts on search from many years ago,
893
01:09:19,830 -->
01:09:24,620
actually, where, you know, I don't know the details of it, but the clause was essentially
894
01:09:25,100 -->
01:09:31,960
there are certain domains, you know, tracker domains that shall not block if you have a,
895
01:09:32,279 -->
01:09:36,540
you know, any block list that you're applying in your product. We were not, I think at the time,
896
01:09:36,640 -->
01:09:44,940
transparent about that enough. And so even though it's, I think a lot of people misconstrued it as,
897
01:09:44,940 -->
01:09:48,339
oh, we were collecting data and sharing it with Microsoft. Never the case. There were never,
898
01:09:48,609 -->
01:09:52,339
you know, there's nothing, no information from search being shared with Microsoft like that.
899
01:09:52,710 -->
01:09:59,080
It was just that our tracker blocking on third-party websites didn't go as far as,
900
01:09:59,630 -->
01:10:06,600
you know, it potentially could have gone on those couple Microsoft domains, but it was still well
901
01:10:06,620 -->
01:10:08,740
beyond what most other tools provide.
902
01:10:09,340 -->
01:10:11,680
Now, we heard the feedback loud and clear on that.
903
01:10:11,820 -->
01:10:13,180
We should have been transparent about it.
904
01:10:14,120 -->
01:10:17,920
Since that's what led us to go document these things much more granular,
905
01:10:18,020 -->
01:10:19,660
I mentioned earlier, we have these help pages.
906
01:10:20,080 -->
01:10:23,600
We spend months going in and documenting everything worked per platform.
907
01:10:24,220 -->
01:10:26,980
If there's any exceptions we grant, we listed those out.
908
01:10:28,220 -->
01:10:35,200
We also were able to work with Microsoft to change that policy as well,
909
01:10:35,340 -->
01:10:37,440
so that we could start to block those
910
01:10:37,760 -->
01:10:40,300
and there wouldn't be such an exception overall.
911
01:10:40,560 -->
01:10:44,480
But yeah, I understand that people may have been concerned about that
912
01:10:44,780 -->
01:10:47,820
and we hopefully have satisfied those concerns.
913
01:10:48,580 -->
01:10:52,060
Yeah, I think the default is to be quite angry and frustrated,
914
01:10:52,380 -->
01:10:54,840
but I think when you hear more of the details
915
01:10:54,860 -->
01:10:58,040
and also I think the response to it has been quite solid
916
01:10:58,280 -->
01:11:01,340
and it's good to see that kind of change over time.
917
01:11:01,540 -->
01:11:03,360
You mentioned feedback from the community
918
01:11:03,520 -->
01:11:04,940
And I think I saw a recent poll.
919
01:11:05,260 -->
01:11:09,820
It's been a few months now, I think, but you guys polled the community to see what people think about AI.
920
01:11:10,320 -->
01:11:10,880
Yes, yeah.
921
01:11:11,300 -->
01:11:12,280
Yes, AI, no AI.
922
01:11:12,880 -->
01:11:15,080
Yeah, no AI seemed to be quite overwhelming.
923
01:11:16,120 -->
01:11:20,720
But at the same time, you all have AI features that you're continuing to roll out.
924
01:11:20,860 -->
01:11:26,880
So I wanted to see kind of what your guys' views are on AI, how you think it fits in the ecosystem,
925
01:11:27,460 -->
01:11:32,820
and how you're balancing kind of that feedback of people who don't want AI with maybe some of the people who do.
926
01:11:32,920 -->
01:11:51,840
Absolutely. Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, we had this, we had a poll because we knew, we knew that there was, there's a bunch of different opinions and attitudes about AI out there. And so we wanted to spur some conversation about it. So the, yeah, the poll was, are you yes AI or no AI? And as you stated that a lot of people said they were in the no AI camp.
927
01:11:52,500 -->
01:11:56,260
And if you, if you like, if you look at that and look at, okay, what do people mean by that?
928
01:11:56,700 -->
01:12:00,800
It tends to be, what is the felt experience for most people relative to AI?
929
01:12:01,600 -->
01:12:05,940
It starts with getting, you know, social feeds filled with AI slop.
930
01:12:06,600 -->
01:12:14,700
Starts with, you know, people getting, having their maybe older generation parents sharing clearly fake videos with them and thinking they're real.
931
01:12:15,320 -->
01:12:18,000
And like, you know, say this with some personal experience.
932
01:12:19,440 -->
01:12:28,460
This is a sort of felt experience that a lot of people have with AI, even though there's a whole bunch of other people that are starting to get a lot of utility out of various use cases.
933
01:12:28,960 -->
01:12:32,220
And so all of it gets lumped in in one bucket.
934
01:12:32,740 -->
01:12:34,520
And so I think both of these things are true.
935
01:12:34,840 -->
01:12:43,060
There's real issues with AI that cause a visceral reaction for a lot of people, whilst at the same time there is utility provided by AI in other ways.
936
01:12:43,520 -->
01:12:48,400
And so our approach has been, and, you know, sort of cemented by, you know, what we've seen
937
01:12:48,400 -->
01:12:50,260
a poll like this, it should be optional.
938
01:12:50,370 -->
01:12:52,660
Like we shouldn't shove things down people's throats.
939
01:12:52,800 -->
01:12:55,700
Like if people don't want AI, let's give them our product.
940
01:12:55,870 -->
01:12:57,800
They can turn it off very easily.
941
01:12:58,440 -->
01:13:03,160
In fact, we added it so that you can from the get-go, like, you know, as a global toggle
942
01:13:03,580 -->
01:13:05,320
in our browsers, you can toggle it off.
943
01:13:05,630 -->
01:13:07,980
And then there's no AI entry point for chat.
944
01:13:08,940 -->
01:13:12,120
You can disable, you know, in our search results.
945
01:13:12,460 -->
01:13:15,660
We have a search assist that sometimes will give you AI type summaries.
946
01:13:16,060 -->
01:13:16,960
You can disable that.
947
01:13:17,140 -->
01:13:18,080
You can also adjust it.
948
01:13:18,120 -->
01:13:20,620
Like you can say, I want to see this more or less.
949
01:13:20,980 -->
01:13:23,640
Everyone, they should have the ability to turn it off.
950
01:13:23,660 -->
01:13:24,680
And that's the optional bit.
951
01:13:24,900 -->
01:13:29,900
To the point where we literally changed our app name in the app stores for a while to say AI optional.
952
01:13:30,960 -->
01:13:32,860
Just to make it very, very clear to people.
953
01:13:33,140 -->
01:13:38,020
And that's, like I said, compared to other systems out there, other search engines and whatnot,
954
01:13:38,380 -->
01:13:41,000
that are providing no options to people on this stuff at all.
955
01:13:41,640 -->
01:13:42,560
So that's been the approach.
956
01:13:43,260 -->
01:13:44,380
And to my point earlier,
957
01:13:44,520 -->
01:13:45,360
but there's a whole bunch of people
958
01:13:45,420 -->
01:13:46,440
that get in utility from this.
959
01:13:46,860 -->
01:13:48,700
We want to give them that utility.
960
01:13:48,900 -->
01:13:50,480
Like if people are getting value from it,
961
01:13:50,500 -->
01:13:51,260
we want to do it
962
01:13:51,460 -->
01:13:53,080
and we want to do it in a way
963
01:13:53,120 -->
01:13:54,100
that gives them more privacy.
964
01:13:54,680 -->
01:13:57,840
And that's essentially why we've built DuckAI out
965
01:13:58,040 -->
01:13:59,540
where, as I sort of mentioned earlier,
966
01:13:59,640 -->
01:14:02,600
we try to anonymize the chat metadata.
967
01:14:03,420 -->
01:14:04,840
We, for most model,
968
01:14:05,160 -->
01:14:06,100
for a lot of model providers,
969
01:14:06,600 -->
01:14:08,520
we have a zero data retention policy,
970
01:14:08,960 -->
01:14:10,440
meaning we've got them to agree
971
01:14:10,440 -->
01:14:11,360
to zero data retention.
972
01:14:11,920 -->
01:14:14,380
when any chats are passed on.
973
01:14:14,520 -->
01:14:16,220
For others, there's a minimal data retention.
974
01:14:16,300 -->
01:14:17,600
We're trying to be transparent about that.
975
01:14:17,980 -->
01:14:20,280
And then for all of our providers,
976
01:14:21,200 -->
01:14:22,540
we do no AI training.
977
01:14:22,900 -->
01:14:26,160
So we've set it up so that if you're using our DuckAI
978
01:14:26,700 -->
01:14:27,440
and behind the scenes,
979
01:14:27,560 -->
01:14:28,860
you're using an open AI model
980
01:14:29,120 -->
01:14:31,780
or a model from Anthropoc, whomever,
981
01:14:32,440 -->
01:14:33,980
it's set to no data training.
982
01:14:34,300 -->
01:14:36,280
And while you could probably go use
983
01:14:36,560 -->
01:14:37,840
each of these tools individually
984
01:14:38,000 -->
01:14:39,580
and go into settings and adjust this stuff,
985
01:14:39,980 -->
01:14:40,680
to my earlier point,
986
01:14:40,800 -->
01:14:41,940
Most people don't know you can do that.
987
01:14:42,040 -->
01:14:43,760
We won't figure out how to do that.
988
01:14:44,260 -->
01:14:48,320
If you just use DuckAI, it just handles that for you across all these model providers.
989
01:14:48,560 -->
01:14:57,200
And so that's the balance we're trying to strike is for the people that want this and want to start to get the utility from it, give them the option to do that in a private way.
990
01:14:57,360 -->
01:14:59,960
For everyone else that doesn't want it, let them turn it off.
991
01:15:00,420 -->
01:15:13,300
Including we started adding filters to our images on our search where we could try to filter out known sources that provide, you know, AI slop images, clearly fake images in the results.
992
01:15:13,780 -->
01:15:14,240
I saw that.
993
01:15:14,540 -->
01:15:18,940
I did learn a few months ago that you guys actually have a dedicated no AI domain.
994
01:15:20,820 -->
01:15:22,420
I forgot the exact URL.
995
01:15:23,400 -->
01:15:24,740
NoAI.go.com.
996
01:15:25,780 -->
01:15:26,260
Absolutely.
997
01:15:26,400 -->
01:15:27,160
So you can set that.
998
01:15:27,200 -->
01:15:29,700
Like if you're using us as a search in another browser, you can set that.
999
01:15:29,880 -->
01:15:38,120
We're actually in the middle of potentially playing with having it so that you can install a version of our extension on other browsers that will set that as your domain.
1000
01:15:38,180 -->
01:15:41,340
Because some browsers, it's harder to set a custom domain like that.
1001
01:15:41,620 -->
01:15:43,780
Also, I mentioned that you can adjust our search settings.
1002
01:15:44,040 -->
01:15:48,800
But because we have no account, a lot of people, if they blow away their browser data, it resets on them.
1003
01:15:48,960 -->
01:15:55,280
So if they had it set to all these AI things off, and then they blew away all the data, it resets on them.
1004
01:15:55,460 -->
01:15:58,280
So we're trying to make it easier to maintain that state.
1005
01:15:58,680 -->
01:16:03,640
And we'll probably do that via our extension in the near future if you're using us inside of another browser.
1006
01:16:04,520 -->
01:16:04,840
Very cool.
1007
01:16:04,990 -->
01:16:07,960
And then something else, just a very quick question on the Duck AI.
1008
01:16:08,140 -->
01:16:10,180
It's one of my favorite services you guys have ever released.
1009
01:16:10,360 -->
01:16:11,920
I find myself using it a lot.
1010
01:16:12,440 -->
01:16:12,520
Great.
1011
01:16:13,400 -->
01:16:22,720
Not that I don't want to be just freeloading off of you, but I've been getting away with just, because it's normally like, oh, I just have this quick question.
1012
01:16:22,870 -->
01:16:24,820
I want to put it through a more advanced AI model.
1013
01:16:25,560 -->
01:16:27,920
But I just don't want it tied to a personal account.
1014
01:16:28,340 -->
01:16:30,120
and I want it to be somewhat anonymized,
1015
01:16:30,320 -->
01:16:32,340
so I just use DuckAI, and it's been great for that.
1016
01:16:32,700 -->
01:16:35,360
But because you guys do a really good job with this,
1017
01:16:35,580 -->
01:16:38,820
where when I'm logged in, I can keep creating chats,
1018
01:16:39,020 -->
01:16:40,980
and you save all that chat history locally.
1019
01:16:41,090 -->
01:16:43,780
I think now you can sync that chat history through an account
1020
01:16:43,950 -->
01:16:44,700
if you have an account.
1021
01:16:44,830 -->
01:16:45,220
I don't.
1022
01:16:46,360 -->
01:16:47,600
So it's just all in each browser,
1023
01:16:47,610 -->
01:16:49,060
and each browser has its own history for me,
1024
01:16:49,140 -->
01:16:51,320
which is actually a pretty cool workflow.
1025
01:16:51,580 -->
01:16:53,440
My question, though, is there a persistent,
1026
01:16:53,740 -->
01:16:57,460
because you mentioned that it's anonymized every time you open it,
1027
01:16:57,580 -->
01:17:00,220
is there any kind of persistent identifier between chats?
1028
01:17:00,400 -->
01:17:06,160
So let's say I'm going to use Sonnet from Claude, Claude Sonnet,
1029
01:17:06,540 -->
01:17:07,780
in one chat, and I ask,
1030
01:17:07,960 -->
01:17:10,240
hey, look at this video script for me.
1031
01:17:10,300 -->
01:17:12,080
Can you fact check it before I publish this video?
1032
01:17:12,760 -->
01:17:14,800
And then I open a new chat and I say,
1033
01:17:14,940 -->
01:17:19,280
hey, I'm working on a personal video that has nothing.
1034
01:17:19,820 -->
01:17:22,400
But will it be able to know that these are the two same people
1035
01:17:22,520 -->
01:17:23,520
if it's two different chats?
1036
01:17:23,720 -->
01:17:25,660
On the model provider side, you're asking?
1037
01:17:26,080 -->
01:17:30,180
Yes, will Claude know that these two chats came from the same person,
1038
01:17:30,420 -->
01:17:34,600
or is it designed where both are just coming from DuckDuckGo user?
1039
01:17:35,260 -->
01:17:37,880
I think the last, I'm going to be honest with you,
1040
01:17:37,920 -->
01:17:38,980
I don't work on this stuff,
1041
01:17:39,220 -->
01:17:41,760
so I don't want to say definitively one way or another.
1042
01:17:42,440 -->
01:17:43,740
I can certainly check with a colleague.
1043
01:17:43,900 -->
01:17:45,100
I think it's the latter, though,
1044
01:17:45,340 -->
01:17:49,760
that there is not a persistent identifier on the model provider side.
1045
01:17:50,060 -->
01:17:53,660
And that's to my point earlier about stripping out PII in the metadata,
1046
01:17:54,260 -->
01:17:56,060
inclusive of IP address and that sort of thing.
1047
01:17:56,270 -->
01:17:58,000
And so I think we're looking at ways
1048
01:17:58,300 -->
01:18:00,660
of sort of enabling some persistence of that
1049
01:18:01,240 -->
01:18:02,440
coming via the client.
1050
01:18:02,800 -->
01:18:04,900
But yeah, I'm not familiar with all the details
1051
01:18:05,200 -->
01:18:06,540
on what we're currently doing there,
1052
01:18:06,570 -->
01:18:07,160
to be honest with you.
1053
01:18:07,700 -->
01:18:07,840
Cool.
1054
01:18:08,330 -->
01:18:09,520
And then, you know, just to zoom out
1055
01:18:09,680 -->
01:18:11,740
and we can start rounding things out here.
1056
01:18:11,940 -->
01:18:14,200
I did want to ask, you know, an interesting question
1057
01:18:14,400 -->
01:18:15,760
because you guys are developing this ecosystem.
1058
01:18:15,810 -->
01:18:16,780
It seems quite intentional.
1059
01:18:16,960 -->
01:18:18,920
You're picking strategically services
1060
01:18:19,200 -->
01:18:20,000
that you know people,
1061
01:18:20,820 -->
01:18:22,480
almost everyone is using at this point.
1062
01:18:22,710 -->
01:18:23,660
And if they're not using it,
1063
01:18:23,740 -->
01:18:27,980
There's a very intentional reason why you chose to include it, and it still integrates with your other tools.
1064
01:18:29,120 -->
01:18:31,760
But what do you feel like today your ecosystem doesn't cover?
1065
01:18:32,020 -->
01:18:42,940
Is there something you guys are looking at that is part of a very concerning trend in the privacy space that you guys don't have a solution for yet and that you think needs to exist?
1066
01:18:43,940 -->
01:18:53,160
To your point, I think, you know, when we started expanding beyond search and then browsers, we very much took a pretty wide lens on,
1067
01:18:53,400 -->
01:18:57,600
all right, what are all the privacy threats that exist in these different spaces?
1068
01:18:57,640 -->
01:19:05,000
And that included everything from social media to your phone and your ISP to you name it.
1069
01:19:05,020 -->
01:19:06,840
And so we looked across all of these.
1070
01:19:07,880 -->
01:19:14,940
We tried to develop a good understanding of each of those threat models and the market overall.
1071
01:19:15,680 -->
01:19:21,080
And we basically ultimately had a rubric where we kind of narrowed in to say,
1072
01:19:21,300 -->
01:19:27,100
okay, we think these are the spaces that make the most sense for us to go into based on our capabilities,
1073
01:19:28,330 -->
01:19:32,080
whether or not there's an actual market for it and demand out there,
1074
01:19:33,040 -->
01:19:35,180
and what the competition looked like and that sort of thing.
1075
01:19:35,340 -->
01:19:39,700
We obviously don't want to go – if there's great providers offering a solution in a certain space,
1076
01:19:40,100 -->
01:19:44,700
we don't want to go in there unnecessarily and try to compete
1077
01:19:45,690 -->
01:19:49,100
unless there's a reason that it needs more privacy in that space.
1078
01:19:49,320 -->
01:19:55,000
So there's a lot of the different verticals here that have some concerning elements to them.
1079
01:19:55,560 -->
01:20:12,240
But I would say the ones we've picked, which is search, browser, AI, are for us the most compelling for a few reasons, including that it has the widest ability for us to influence the standard of trust online, which is sort of the overall vision for DuckDuckGo.
1080
01:20:12,660 -->
01:20:14,160
Because this is how people are getting online.
1081
01:20:14,250 -->
01:20:18,800
This is where they're spending their time via browser, via search, via more recently AI.
1082
01:20:19,160 -->
01:20:21,660
That doesn't mean we won't look at some of the other ones in the future.
1083
01:20:21,900 -->
01:20:28,680
But to your earlier question, there's a chat space in terms of instant messaging.
1084
01:20:29,040 -->
01:20:32,240
But of course, there's products like Signal that exist there.
1085
01:20:32,560 -->
01:20:34,000
We've looked at some of these spaces.
1086
01:20:35,100 -->
01:20:38,920
ISPs tend to collect a good amount of information from people.
1087
01:20:39,240 -->
01:20:44,260
Credit card services and credit cards overall tend to data mine quite a bit.
1088
01:20:44,780 -->
01:20:48,900
We have looked at these and there are concerning trends in a lot of these spaces.
1089
01:20:49,220 -->
01:21:01,460
But, yeah, we either feel that there are decent solutions or it would be too difficult of a problem for us to solve in a tractable way in a meaningful time frame in some of these spaces.
1090
01:21:01,590 -->
01:21:07,600
And so the ones we've picked are hopefully the best mix of those that give people the most benefit.
1091
01:21:08,660 -->
01:21:15,020
Nice. And is there anything that we're able to share publicly about things that people can expect in the future?
1092
01:21:15,940 -->
01:21:30,500
Yeah. So, I mean, I think I mentioned a couple of things earlier, but like from our browser standpoint, you'll see our browsers gain capabilities and be capable of being your everyday browser for most people overall.
1093
01:21:30,940 -->
01:21:34,520
And we keep iterating on those. So that's something to look forward to.
1094
01:21:34,940 -->
01:21:41,140
On the DuckAI side, everyone's sort of figuring out these use cases and what the utility is and what's emerging.
1095
01:21:41,270 -->
01:21:51,260
But certainly you'll see us start to introduce things between image generation and other things like that as part of the DuckAI that we offer.
1096
01:21:51,500 -->
01:21:59,260
You'll see in our browsers the ability to introduce much more context, not just like the tab you're on and ask questions to AI about that,
1097
01:21:59,400 -->
01:22:01,940
but introduce multi-tab sort of context,
1098
01:22:02,340 -->
01:22:04,940
be able to ask things across those tabs.
1099
01:22:05,520 -->
01:22:07,620
And we're trying to be very thoughtful on how we do this
1100
01:22:07,960 -->
01:22:12,680
to not just needlessly introduce security or privacy issues.
1101
01:22:12,940 -->
01:22:15,100
So we're being quite cautious about it.
1102
01:22:15,260 -->
01:22:18,180
But yeah, you'll see all kinds of capabilities expand there
1103
01:22:18,900 -->
01:22:21,180
over the coming months for people, which is great.
1104
01:22:22,100 -->
01:22:24,120
Nice. Well, I want to thank you for your time, Peter.
1105
01:22:24,380 -->
01:22:27,659
And if people enjoy this interview, they want to learn more
1106
01:22:27,660 -->
01:22:29,940
or they want to get involved with you or DuckDuckGo,
1107
01:22:30,190 -->
01:22:31,720
where would you kind of send them to connect?
1108
01:22:33,120 -->
01:22:35,000
Yeah, it's been great sharing with you as well, Henry.
1109
01:22:35,150 -->
01:22:36,780
First of all, I really appreciate it.
1110
01:22:36,830 -->
01:22:37,780
If they want to connect with me,
1111
01:22:38,040 -->
01:22:40,360
you can probably do so in a couple of ways.
1112
01:22:40,600 -->
01:22:42,260
Like, you know, I'm available on LinkedIn.
1113
01:22:42,960 -->
01:22:45,960
You can find me on, I don't really use x.com that much,
1114
01:22:46,100 -->
01:22:47,520
but I'm there if you want to message me.
1115
01:22:47,820 -->
01:22:50,480
You know, I still use it to follow some professional threads
1116
01:22:50,740 -->
01:22:53,120
and interesting stuff in the privacy space once in a while.
1117
01:22:53,700 -->
01:22:54,800
There, you can find me there.
1118
01:22:55,040 -->
01:23:00,060
Yeah, otherwise, you can give me an email if you want, peter at duck.com.
1119
01:23:01,140 -->
01:23:01,880
Makes it easy for you.
1120
01:23:02,520 -->
01:23:02,800
Very nice.
1121
01:23:02,910 -->
01:23:03,560
Well, thank you, Peter.
1122
01:23:03,960 -->
01:23:06,020
And I hope that people learned something cool today.
1123
01:23:06,940 -->
01:23:07,380
Thank you, Henry.
1124
01:23:07,540 -->
01:23:07,920
Appreciate it.
1125
01:23:08,340 -->
01:23:08,780
There you have it.
1126
01:23:08,780 -->
01:23:12,180
I hope that you learned something new or many things new about DuckDuckGo.
1127
01:23:12,400 -->
01:23:13,300
I know I did.
1128
01:23:13,330 -->
01:23:16,240
And it was wonderful to talk to a team member behind the company.
1129
01:23:16,490 -->
01:23:20,400
Duck.ai is definitely a big talking point and something that I want to do more follow
1130
01:23:20,560 -->
01:23:21,400
up on in the future.
1131
01:23:21,720 -->
01:23:28,000
So if you have any more questions or requests, please let us know in the comments or using our feedback link on our website.
1132
01:23:28,460 -->
01:23:34,920
Otherwise, I just want to thank you all for being here and learning something new about how to keep yourself safe and the people around you safe along the way.
1133
01:23:35,160 -->
01:23:40,140
Finally, if you like this kind of content and you want to contribute to it, you can become a Techlorian down in the show notes.
1134
01:23:40,170 -->
01:23:41,900
You get access to our private signal group.
1135
01:23:41,930 -->
01:23:43,080
You get to support what we're doing.
1136
01:23:43,450 -->
01:23:48,060
You get credits in our videos and on our website, depending on which tier that you're on.
1137
01:23:48,380 -->
01:23:53,840
And we have many other perks lined up for you to try to at least do something as a thank you for you supporting us.
1138
01:23:54,500 -->
01:23:57,620
Thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next time on Techlore Talks.
