On December 13th, a new search engine called “Anti-Google” called Neeva will be available in Canada. I wrote about this on itworldcanada.comIt allows people to browse the internet without web tracking and promises to pay content creators for using their work.
Neeva has already launched in the US in 2021, and more recently in Europe.
In today’s Hashtag Trends The Weekend Edition, we are with Neeva CEO and Founder Sridhar Ramaswamy.
Our topic is privacy and the internet. He has two words that only match when talking about “lack or privacy”. Neeva is a response, but it’s also an attempt to change the model for how Internet services are delivered.
The economic model of the Internet and social media is based on exchanging personal information in exchange for desired features and services.
All services you use for free, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, or your favorite website, monetize your data to some degree.
It happened to us slowly. In the beginning, the Internet was “non-commercial.” It was a free and brave new digital world.
That new digital utopia didn’t last long. someone had to pay for it.
A company has built a site and ads are now showing. It was no longer a great utopia, but it was still a model we could understand.It was on TV and radio for years. We got the free show, but with the trade-off of having to listen to an ad every 7 minutes.
But somewhere along the line, advertisers and service providers realized that this new medium was different from television and radio. They can track you and everything you do. It can gather very specific knowledge about you – it can know almost everything about you – your interactions from.
It’s not always obvious. We may have been aware that other people were collecting our data, until the big Facebook scandal where a company called Cambridge Analytica collected data using an app called This is Your Digital Life. I don’t think it was. Without Permission – Collected data of 87 million Facebook profiles and used that data to further Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The company claims that reading likes and dislikes can predict things like who to vote for, from very personal to sexual preferences. It doesn’t just advertise to you. Some say it targets you psychologically, influences you, and manipulates you.
People who didn’t care before began to realize that their data could end up in the wrong hands. Some were afraid. Many were outraged.
The online movement #Delete Facebook went viral on Twitter.
Facebook apologized.
Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission.
The government has started considering new laws. It is led by Europe and spread to Canada and the United States.
People and governments have started using our data to radicalize people and question the impact of data used in algorithms that promote hate groups and hate speech.
Attention is no longer traded for products. It is potentially trading your most private information and using it to manipulate you, not to persuade you.
But can we have a broader debate about what is private, what is appropriate, and what requires regulation?
Out of the ashes of resentment and anger, some enterprising entrepreneurs are redefining our digital interactions and creating new digital products and services that change business models. . Do they offer ways to protect individual privacy? Can Internet business models change?
Join Neeva Sridhar Ramaswamy for an interesting discussion on Hashtag Trends The Weekend Edition with Neeva Founder.
