Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of privacy-minded search engine DuckDuckGo, wants his message to be clear: It is possible to run a profitable ad-based digital business in 2019 without tracking and leveraging your users’ personal data.

It’s more assertion than opinion. His Paoli-based company has been profitable since 2014, and last year brought in “substantially more than … $25 million” in revenue, according to his testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week on data privacy regulations and its impacts on competition and innovation.

“In many ways I come to you from the future: I run a business that is already GDPR- and CCPA- compliant,” said Weinberg. “Our privacy policy is straightforward and doesn’t require a law degree to decipher: We simply do not collect or share any personal information at all. That’s it — no confusing settings to fiddle with, no jargon-filled pages to read. Yet, even with this simple privacy policy, we nonetheless are able to make money through advertising.”

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