<story><title>DuckDuckGo email protection beta now open</title><url>https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo-email-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yegg</author><text>DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 through private search ads, and our company is not controlled or beholden to venture capital (or VC or other money).&lt;p&gt;Our product vision is an &amp;quot;easy button&amp;quot; for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.&lt;p&gt;We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;duckduckgo.com&amp;#x2F;email&amp;#x2F;privacy-guarantees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;duckduckgo.com&amp;#x2F;email&amp;#x2F;privacy-guarantees&lt;/a&gt; and we will not be putting ads on it.</text></item><item><author>jrexilius</author><text>Dear DuckDuckGo,&lt;p&gt;Please let me pay for this service.  It looks worth having and: 1) I&amp;#x27;d like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I&amp;#x27;d like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lolinder</author><text>This answers the VC money fear, but not everything else OP brought up.&lt;p&gt;If a product is subsidized by a company&amp;#x27;s other products, it&amp;#x27;s hard for me to believe it&amp;#x27;ll be around forever. For an email product, that&amp;#x27;s a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a &lt;i&gt;long&lt;/i&gt; time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company&amp;#x27;s sunsetting notice.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That&amp;#x27;s helpful to know, but I&amp;#x27;m still skeptical that that&amp;#x27;s sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a &lt;i&gt;feature&lt;/i&gt; was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I&amp;#x27;ll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.</text></comment>
<story><title>DuckDuckGo email protection beta now open</title><url>https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo-email-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yegg</author><text>DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 through private search ads, and our company is not controlled or beholden to venture capital (or VC or other money).&lt;p&gt;Our product vision is an &amp;quot;easy button&amp;quot; for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.&lt;p&gt;We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;duckduckgo.com&amp;#x2F;email&amp;#x2F;privacy-guarantees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;duckduckgo.com&amp;#x2F;email&amp;#x2F;privacy-guarantees&lt;/a&gt; and we will not be putting ads on it.</text></item><item><author>jrexilius</author><text>Dear DuckDuckGo,&lt;p&gt;Please let me pay for this service.  It looks worth having and: 1) I&amp;#x27;d like to know that it is funded by users, rather than advertisers and thus can resist privacy invasion presuures. 2) I&amp;#x27;d like to have some basis for belief that it will be around longer than it takes the VC money to run out, (or the marketing budget, or whatever non-sustainable pot it comes from).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinaypai</author><text>DDG has regularly raised money from VCs including a Series D about a year ago.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&amp;#x2F;organization&amp;#x2F;duck-duck-go&amp;#x2F;company_financials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&amp;#x2F;organization&amp;#x2F;duck-duck-go&amp;#x2F;company...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>