Privacy is important. We all want our privacy to be respected and don’t like it when our information is shared, or worse, when it is sold with or without our consent.
On the other hand, we live in an age where many aspects of our lives are mediated by digital platforms. We share content, look for information, watch movies, produce, consume, connect, work, and relax online. Many of us love the convenience of interacting with platforms that know our preferences and are implicitly personalized.
At You.com, we reflected deeply on the apparent tension between privacy and convenience. On one side of the privacy-convenience spectrum, you have ad-based platforms that massively invade your privacy but have incredible convenience and personalization. They use trackers to follow you across sites and profile you to bombard you with targeted ads on all of your devices. Most people don’t like that, and they assume it’s a necessary evil.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are tools to protect your anonymity online. These tools are designed to help you actively fight being tracked. Ad blockers, browser extensions, VPNs, and the TOR browser fall in this category.
When deciding the architecture of You.com, we asked ourselves: “What data would be okay to collect, when to collect it, and for which purpose?”
Our values are trust, facts, and kindness. We looked for ways to balance privacy and convenience when using a search engine.
It would be easy to decide not to collect any information at all: simply turn off all logging and be done with it. This would however prevent us from offering services that our users love, like the ability to customize your search results. Also, as the young startup that we are, we would not be listening to feedback from our users; we would be flying completely blind, and this would not help us give our users what they want. At the same time, we understand that there are queries that users do not want anybody to know about.
You.com gives the decision power back to you. We have developed two complementary modes of operation: private mode and personal mode. They reinforce each other to give you the most action-oriented search engine on the planet.
More importantly, we decided to empower our users with the ability to decide and switch between these modes easily. If you’d like to search the web in a completely private and anonymous way, private mode allows you to do so. If you want a personalized search engine that returns the information in the way you want it with localized results (like "best thai restaurant near me"), personal mode is the way to go.
In this way, at every moment, you can decide where you would like to sit in the privacy-convenience spectrum.
When you search the web in private mode, we take a number of steps to respect your privacy: