And I think that's what people want: They don't want tons of different choices and controls, they just want not to be tracked and targeted online. We like to call it the 'easy button' for privacy. In fact, I think that's generally what people want. And our basic product vision is 'privacy simplified.' And simplified is really making one choice: the choice that you want privacy, you don't want to be coerced. And the reason is that choice and transparency - sometimes what they call notice and consent, where you get all these cookie dialogs, asking you to make all these controls - can be really complicated and confusing. And our solve for that, generally, is to give people solutions to not only protect their personal information, but to make it so they're not really trying to be manipulated online.ĭoes that then lead you down the road of thinking the solution to everything is choice and transparency? So you can be coerced in a lot of different ways. The filter bubble and misinformation, where you're getting presented with information trying to coerce you based on your personal attributes, that is a privacy violation that people don't often connect with privacy.

And when you think about it from that perspective, all sorts of things relate to privacy. And the flip side of that is, it's protecting you from not being coerced to make decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. I think the definition is a little more abstract, but wider than that, which is: It is protecting your personal autonomy. And I think a common definition is, 'Privacy is protecting your personal information.' I do not think that's the right definition, to be clear. I've literally done the digital equivalent of writing on the whiteboard! Yes, you're right, people have lots of different definitions. But I'm assuming at some point, you've had to, like, write on the whiteboard, 'Here is what we mean when we talk about privacy.' So define it for me. But we're actually talking about 1,000 things that only slightly overlap, and so it's hard to have one coherent conversation about privacy, because we don't even know what we're talking about. I get the sense that when we talk about privacy, it sounds like we're talking about the same thing.

I want to know how you define privacy, both in your own head and at DuckDuckGo. Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear our full conversation on the latest episode of the Source Code podcast, or by clicking on the player above.

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