Interview: Startpage, our first Digital Trust Hero
What does Startpage do and what are their goals? CEO and co-founder Robert E.G. Beens reveals this and more in this interview.
Today we start with our very first Digital Trust Hero — tadaaa: Startpage. Startpage develops products that give you control over what personal data you do and don’t want to share online. The vision is nothing less than to create “the world’s most private search engine” that doesn’t collect, record or share your personal data. Find out exactly how it works and more in this interview with Startpage CEO and co-founder Robert E.G. Beens.
Startpage is an anonymous search engine that protects your privacy. First, a brief overview of why we recommend you to use Startpage:
- Startpage has a good search quality, because it uses Google search, but without tracking your data
- They are committed to privacy protection
- No personal data is collected, recorded or shared
- Test winner in the category of search engines at Stiftung Warentest in 2019
- The search queries of the users are anonymously forwarded to Google
- Search queries from Europe are routed exclusively via a server in the Netherlands and are thus protected from access by US authorities
- Offers parental controls
What makes Startpage a digital trust hero?
Search engines are the gatekeepers of the Internet. Essential tools to get to the endless information available. Startpage is the world’s first and most private search engine. Offering high quality Google leads to unrestricted privacy.
Hello Robert! Describe the three most important qualities that made you successful in founding a company.
I find it hard to talk about my own qualities — I rather have other people judge me on that — but i think the following characteristics have played the biggest role in our companies success:
- A strong, well-developed sense of justice. Personal data from customers is theirs, not ours. Just because people use our search engine doesn’t give us the right to use or abuse it for commercial reasons.
- Ability to get a high quality team together, each with their own skills and expertise. Alone you can only accomplish so much. With a solid team , you can move mountains.
- Willing to put in endless time and energy to make it work. Focussed on privacy as our mission, it didn’t feel like work though.
What was your main goal in founding Startpage?
During a legal audit in 2005 we learned how much sensitive personal data search engines were gathering. Data that is gathered can be hacked , subpoened or used to track you with ads. To commercially exploit you other search engines use IP addresses, cookies or finger printing techniques to create very personal profiles of you. This leads to huge privacy consequences. At Startpage we believe privacy is a basic human right. That’s why, as early as 2006, we founded Startpage.com the world’s first, and most private search engine. We don’t track you and we don’t profile you. Our goal is to simply offer you the best possible search results for free in full privacy. It has been our unchanged goal for the past 15 years.
What role does data protection play for Startpage?
It is our mission and our policy. It is our unique selling point. We store no personal information, practice data minimization, ‘privacy by design’ and ‘privacy by default’. The latter means we use setting by default that offer the best protection.
What makes you special when dealing with sensitive personal data compared to your competitors, such as duckduckgo, ecosia, etc.? Or better, what are the main differences?
We are headquartered in the Netherlands, meaning anyone who uses Startpage is protected by stringent Dutch and EU privacy laws including GDPR. We have a unique contract with Google to provide us with their best in-class search results. But we don’t store or share any of your personal data. Other search engines use Bing search results, which are considered of lower quality, especially for the non-english languages. We believe the privacy Startpage offers is superior to other search engines that jumped on the privacy band-wagon later on. Startpage offers the free Anonymous View feature that allows you to browse privately. It’s free and protects you far better than a VPN.
What tip can you give our readers on how to use search engines correctly?
First, select on privacy and quality search results. When typing in search queries think about bollean operators like AND, OR & NOT. Using AND you are searching for a results that has both keywords in it. OR means one or the other. NOT expludes results that include the search term. Another tip is searching through the image search option. Say you are looking for a particular camera. You know the brand but not the type. By using image search you get large numbers of images where you can select the one you were looking for and go back to a specific site to learn the type.
How will the handling of data on the Internet be managed in the future? What tendency do you see there?
Big tech companies have become addicted to our personal data. They have too much $$$ to gain form exploiting us and will aim to continue their practices. Much will depend on how regulators are able to force them to behave.The GDPR legislation is a good first step in the right direction to assure privacy rights for online consumers. Starting to us privacy friendly, easy alternatives like Startpage.com is a vote for privacy too.
If you could have spend an evening with a famous person, who would it be and why?
Edward Snowden. When Snowden learned about the massive spying and surveillance that was taking place in the U.S. he felt he had no choice than to let the world know. He knew in advance his life as he knew it would be over. He valued our privacy so much that he was willing to sacrifice his own comfortable life and freedom for it. That makes him our true privacy HERO!
Thank you very much for the exciting interview, Robert!
Learn more about our very first Digital Trust Hero Startpage at https://startpage.com/en
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