Weinberg said he paid $7,000 last week to post a billboard in San Francisco questioning Google's privacy policies and directing searchers to his own site, a challenge that won coverage in Wired, TechCrunch, and other software media.
What's wrong with Google? Many users don't realize how the search terms they put into that popular search engine are collected at the sites they visit, Weinberg said in an interview. "While there's millions of websites that run ads, there's only a few ad networks. All those sites are running the same third-party code that can aggregate all your searches. So the ad network can [collect] all your searches" - and learn a lot you might want to keep private. DuckDuckGo promises to redirect queries, track-free.
Google spokesman Rob Shilkin responded with a prepared statement: "It's unfortunate that DuckDuckGo is preying on people's fears and offering incomplete information in order to garner attention."
Shilkin called "inaccurate" a claim on Weinberg's propaganda page, donttrack.us, that Google might enable drug companies to learn about herpes sufferers who looked up information on the disease. He said Google offers users the tools to block search-tracking, if that is what they wish to do. Still, Weinberg says his message is penetrating: "We were getting 2.5 million searches a month. It spiked with this billboard. I'm going to do 3.5 million, 4 million searches this month," according to internal data.
