Privacy-Protecting Search Engine DuckDuckGo Nets $100M After 55 Pct Traffic Increase

DuckDuckGo, the search engine which puts users’ privacy first, completed a $100 million funding round recently, a company blog says.

The investors included included OMERS Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America Fund, Brian Acton, Tim Berners-Lee, Freada Kapor Klein, Mitch Kapor, and others, the blog says.

The new finances give the company the ability to keep growing.

The company will now be able to advise more users on a new solution for internet privacy.

“Privacy is freedom. It treats people like people, not data points, and empowers anyone online to escape manipulation from online profiling,” the blog says.

The company thinks its efforts will go toward the reduction of data collection and targeting, which will hopefully help stop the spread of online misinformation and political polarization.

The blog notes that DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 and has revenue of over $100 million per year.

And the company has been debuting new ads through billboards, radio and TV in 175 metro areas in the U.S. The company was also looking at putting those things in play for the European market and other places.

Data privacy is quickly becoming paramount in several places including the European Union and the U.S. In a survey of U.S. customers, 87 percent of respondents said data privacy should be considered a human right.

In addition, many respondents don’t know how companies are using their information, with around 70 percent of consumers complaining about this lack of transparency.

In the EU, there’s also a reckoning going on with the way data collection has been going, with lawsuits over data collection from minors and other such things.

YouTube, for example, could face trouble if its practices are found to be in violation of EU privacy rules.

Digital channels became more popular during the early months of the pandemic. But along with that came fraud concerns, with fraudsters now looking more at the aforementioned security standards to commit crimes.