I want the internet to be a place where people can find, publish, share and information with other people, from investigative journalists to hobbyists sharing their personal findings and opinions publicly.

The important thing is that we must be able to do it as a part of our freedom to express ourselves and the need to freely search for information. We have to do it with respect for other people’s opinions or beliefs, but it is of the utmost importance we can share our opinions and find unbiased information that challenges what we think.

Who is selling you? © findx

It scares me that we are for sale

Most people believe they can look for information on the internet without being surveilled - but this is not true.

We can’t look at most websites without being monitored by ad-tech companies like Google and Facebook and other conglomerates we don’t even know the names of — the fact is we are under constant surveillance.

In a seminar that I recently went to, a large ad-tech company mentioned that they can track and identify 70–80% of online visitors on the web. By correlating information from cookies and other data sources, ad-tech companies know your preferences and opinions very accurately, and can target you exactly when and with the specific ads they want to.

In that same seminar, the terminology from the marketer presenting scared the sh.. out of me:

”…when doing targeted advertising, we have now so much data correlated that we actually do buy individual people, if you want a blond 38 old woman, with two kids and a Nexus phone I can buy her for you…”

Not many other businesses speak about buying people…

This really means that you are not free to express yourself, you are not free to search and find information on the internet — the ad-tech industry is constantly monitoring your behaviour.

What happens when we become the product to be traded?

From building findx.com, I know just how much spam and auto-generated website content there is on thousands of shady websites that brings no value at all to the public. They are only built to lure people to visit them, hoping for a click on an ad. Luckily, many spam sites are relatively easy to filter out, technically.

It is, however, problematic that a lot of content today is produced only to lure us onto a webpage to show us ads, in the hope some of us will click them. The latest example of this grey-zone, where content is purely a vehicle for ads, is the wave of “fake news” websites.

How do we determine when someone is speaking freely about his or her opinion? Can we tell when it is actually a lie told deliberately to persuade the public opinion, or when it is just publishers and the ad-tech industry monetizing people?

For me it creates a feeling of insecurity and mistrust, constantly trying to determine who’s trying to drag me into something I don’t want to participate in? Who can I trust?

One thing is for sure, almost all the websites have tracking technologies built in, because they or the third-parties the collaborate with, want to sell us as products, and someone wants to buy us — we have become products for trade.

You are the product — it is that simple

Google has done amazing things to internet search and made it possible for a lot of people to find information and Facebook has… sorry, I don’t really know what they did, but people apparently needed them at some point.

Let’s be clear about the premise these kind of businesses are built upon: The business model is built on the data they can collect about you and your behaviour, with one single purpose — to sell your data to advertisers. The initial intentions for those services might have been different, but it turned out to be such a lucrative business model that it couldn’t be resisted.

But we are about to lose our grip on our freedom of expression and access to information to the ad-tech companies and their so-called surveillance capitalism, a term used and popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff, a term that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.

You are the product © findx

The publisher and the advertiser have a choice

Publishers need to make money in order to provide quality journalism, and everybody knows that advertisements are a part of the equation. And it is logical that companies are promoting their products and services in contexts where it is appropriate. Read more about the problem with ads here

But now, publishers are also losing their grip, maybe unwillingly in some case: They have become a wheel of the surveillance capitalism wagon, and are now in the hands of the ad-tech industry which is holding the steering wheel.

Publishers can act — they can choose partners that don’t use unethical tracking technologies. The hunt for higher click rates and thereby earnings makes it a hard choice — and also here, alternatives are on their way, like the latest announcement from Jimmy Wales about Wikitribune. The publishing industry is also questioning the appropriateness of Facebook as a distribution channel, aren’t they? At least, they should be.

Advertising companies have also started to act, pulling ads from ad networks, because they don’t want their ads associated with extremist content — they are choosing not to use the usual ad-tech companies like Google, who displayed ads in places where they are out of context.

You can act now

Of course I’d love for you to try out our private search engine findx.com, and our browser — but it’s not about that.

You need to start to consider what alternatives you have, whether these are private metasearch engines, messaging services or browsers recommended by privacytools.io or other niche websites.

I challenge you to try an alternative or two, and see if you miss anything when you compare these alternatives with what you use now. Share your experiences, let people like me know what you like and what you miss. And then challenge your friends to try the alternatives too.

Would you choose to put your life into the hands of someone who promises to sell you … ?

Just think about it for a second…. if you could choose to search and browse the web and not being haunted by ads based on your behaviour, your physical location, purchases you make and things you search for and share with your friends… wouldn’t it be great to have that freedom?

How I participate to help people choose alternatives?

Being a part of a team that is building a search engine and a browser is perhaps not so common, but it has turned out to be my opportunity to improve the way people search and browse the web, without the risk of them being exploited down to every last click they make.

I want to be a part of creating an internet where my kids, and, for that matter, all other people can search and browse the internet for information without being exploited by ad-tech companies and their commercial interests.

With my participation in Privacore, I participate on a daily basis, and we have come a long way. We have created an independent alternative to the few search engines you can mention today. Findx helps you search in private! No tracking, no saved search history, no biased searches, and when using our private browser, your informations can’t be correlated with your behaviour either.

We still need to improve, we need to refine various aspects, there are many challenges that we will need to overcome, but we have already come far. If you want to choose searching in private, you can try findx.com here.

Me in the office an early morning

Building alternatives is challenging

It lets me feel that I, with my tiny contribution, am participating and making the internet a better place. For my kids, and for everyone else, so we all can keep searching and browsing to find the information we need and decide what information we share based on our own free will.