In November 2017, Sridhar Ramaswamy, the head of Google’s $ 95 billion ad arm, left the company after a scandal over big corporate ads found in YouTube videos that put children in questionable situations. Ramaswamy told The New York Times that shortly after that incident, she decided she had to do something different in her life, because “an advertising model had limitations.”
Ramaswamy’s startup company Neeva is that “something different,” and while it is also a search engine, it seeks to sidestep some of Google’s problems by avoiding ads entirely. Ramaswamy says the new engine will not show ads and will not collect or benefit from user data; instead, it will charge its users a subscription fee.
Neeva’s approach follows an old cliché that says if you pay for something, you are a customer, but if you get it for free, you are a product. This is likely to be a very difficult sale, to an audience that expects a service to be “free” and often does not care much about privacy issues. Even if we hand-tell the difficulty of acquiring a market, other privacy-focused players are voicing significant doubts about Neeva’s approach.
Privacy-focused competitors have doubts
The DuckDuckGo search engine is probably Google’s best-known competitor focused on privacy. DuckDuckGo serves ads but does not track its users individually; its CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, says the ads are a practical necessity. “If you want the greatest impact to help most people with privacy, you must be free,” he said, “because Google will be free forever.”
However, DuckDuckGo may not be the most relevant comparison with Neeva. The new search engine is planned to be a second-tier provider, with public results coming from Bing, Weather.com, Intrinio, and Apple. It also plans to offer its users the ability to link cloud accounts like Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Dropbox. In addition to providing search results directly from these private sources, Neeva will include that data in creating a profile to customize search results for each user.
The home page is a closer analog to the model proposed by Neeva. Like Neeva, Startpage gets search results externally, in your case directly from Google. Unlike Neeva, Startpage still shows Google ads and collects a portion of the revenue. But it shows those ads without trying to personalize them for the user: no profile is created and the potential identifying information of the user is also removed from the queries transmitted to Google.
Startpage CEO Robert EG Beens contacted Ars via email shortly after the launch of Neeva. He expressed extreme skepticism about Neeva’s model: he describes connections to private data, personal profiling, and long-term data retention as “a hacker’s dream and a user’s nightmare.” He expressed equally strong views on Neeva’s actual privacy policy, calling it “a joke, and not a fun one,” after noting that “marketing messages can claim almost anything, but a privacy policy has legal status. “
Please note that there are two different sections of the Neeva site that appear to address privacy concerns: a prominent Digital Rights Statement on the company page and the official Privacy Policy, more austerely linked from the footer of each page.
Problematic privacy policy
Neeva’s Digital Bill of Rights appears to be the type of marketing message Beens alluded to. Makes lofty statements about users ‘privacy rights, controls over data collection, transparency of data usage, and users’ ownership of their own data. Furthermore, it declares that companies in general must respect those rights, but does not make direct promises about whether or how Neeva will respect them. The closest thing to a specific policy statement on the page is a line at the bottom that says “we at Neeva are waiting [these values], in solidarity with you. “
Neeva’s Privacy Policy, by contrast, is a standard legal document and is read as such. It is also much more concrete and presents some troubling details that sound contrary to the lofty ideals expressed in the Neeva Declaration of Digital Rights. The Disclosure of your information to third parties section even seems to contradict itself.
Neeva opens that section by saying that it does not share, disclose or sell your personal information to third parties “outside of the necessary cases below”, but those necessary cases include “Affiliates”, with the very blunt statement that Neeva “may share personal information information with our affiliated companies. “
Although the subsections of both Service Providers and Advertising Partners are covered with usage limitations, there are no such limits for data shared with “Affiliates”. The document also does not provide a concrete definition of who the term “Affiliates” might refer to, or in what context.
Long-term private data retention
More security conscious users should also be aware of Neeva’s data retention policy, which simply states that “we store the personal information we receive as described in this Privacy Policy for as long as you use our Services or as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected … [including pursuit of] legitimate business purposes. “
Since data collection may include a direct connection to a user’s primary Google or Microsoft email account, this could represent a truly disturbing volume of personal data, data that is now vulnerable to compromising Neeva’s services, as well such as its use or sale (particularly in case of acquisition or merger) by Neeva.
Current availability
Neeva is currently in limited beta testing and is not available for general use. Interested potential users can join a waiting list to become an early tester.
