Take Back Control of Your Privacy Online with You.com

Disclaimer: This blog post was published prior to You.com’s latest AI advancements and may not reflect our current capabilities. You.com has transformed from a search engine to an AI assistant. With a foundation in search and the team’s AI expertise, You.com was perfectly positioned to enhance LLMs with live access to the Internet to address issues around hallucinations and transparency. As such, You.com is capable of tasks ranging from searching online to writing an essay, debugging code, creating digital art, solving complex problems, and more. Learn more about getting the most out of You.com.

You.com also offers its core technology through a suite of self-serve APIs. Get complete details about the YOU API.

Imagine an organization having 83,500 Stephen King novels worth of information on your life. A growing repository filled with detailed data on your online searches, browsing history, video views, purchases, location history, and more. To make matters worse, your data is sold to the highest bidder.

That’s Google today. The above is what happened to Washington Post columnist Stephen King and likely what’s happening to you. Google builds its $1.5 trillion business by grabbing every bit of data it can with very few restrictions. However, the problem is much bigger than Google. Under the guise of allowing unmatched convenience, Big Tech has fostered an internet where privacy is not the default. With monetization as the goal and despite promises to never sell any personal information, these tech monoliths find increasingly creative ways to exploit our data — even data that is truly sensitive.

But what if we did not need to sacrifice privacy on the web? According to Proton, people overwhelmingly want an internet that puts them first. They report that in the last year alone, hundreds of millions of people have chosen to take control of their data and protect their privacy by using privacy-focused tech services. According to Reuters, a 2020 survey by Transcend found that 93% of Americans would switch to a company that prioritizes their privacy if given a choice.

To put it simply, the world wants tech that values people first.

Each day at You.com, we reflect deeply on privacy and the future of the internet. We ask ourselves: “What data would be okay to collect, when to collect it, and for which purpose?” Our answer is that the decision power should be in the hands of our users. Our democratized search engine is one that you control — one where your privacy is the default — one with utmost convenience.

Here’s how You.com ensures privacy in practice:

You.com puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to privacy.

• – We’ve developed two complementary modes of operation: private mode and personal mode. They reinforce each other to give you the most action-oriented search engine on the planet. When looking for a customizable search experience, use personal mode. We collect a minimal amount of data to improve the product and give you a personalized experience. We don’t share that data with anyone. When you’d like an entirely private experience, use our private mode. There’s no data collection or sharing. Period.

You.com offers a zero-trace private mode — the most private search experience of any search engine, even more, private than DuckDuckGo.

• – We don’t store your queries on our servers.
• – We don’t record clicks or any other interaction with the site.
• – We ensure search partners don’t know where or from whom the queries come from. All queries come from our server’s IP address.
• – We disable all apps that need your IP address or location (e.g., location-based apps like maps, Yelp, etc.)

You.com injects privacy into all sides of our search engine and operations

• – You.com does not have privacy-invading ads.
• – You.com does not use any third pixels or attribute tracking in marketing efforts.

You.com partners with other organizations to collectively strive for a more private web

You.com is one of 11 companies that signed Proton’s Privacy Pledge, which was launched in response to the public demand for an internet that gives you control of your privacy. With this pledge, we commit to five basic principles:

• – The internet should be built to serve people.
• – Organizations should only collect data that’s necessary for them to prevent abuse and deliver their services.
• – People’s data should be securely encrypted.
• – Online organizations should be transparent about their identity and software.
• – Web services should be interoperable.

See the full pledge here.

At You.com our values of trust, facts, and kindness are paramount. We commit to building a search engine that puts you first and brings privacy back to tech. After all, better privacy means better internet. YOU is for you. We hope you’ll join us on this mission.

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