You and I do not control the information we put out online. Online media platforms, including professional networks and job portals, covertly obtain users’ permissions to collect data and go on to sell it to anyone who is ready to pay. If you have listed yourself on any of the popular job portals, you must have received several spam emails and phone calls. You end up being continuously bothered, with nothing to show for it.

PC: Toonpool

By the way, this system isn’t good for businesses who are calling you, either. The platforms charge outrageous fees to businesses that are trying to find candidates or buyers. According to the founder and CEO of beBee, Javier Cámara,

“In the current professional ecosystem, businesses are forced to pay large amounts of marketing capital to recruiting and social selling “middlemen”, who weakly target contacts but provide little-to-no direct value to the professionals. This is a lose-lose scenario for professionals and businesses.”

Camara strictly condemns this process and wants to change it. He believes that the more businesses pay to intermediaries, the fewer professionals get compensated. To counter the trend and bring back power to the user, Camara launched beBee platform for professional networking.

“The idea was born when we realized that there is a problem with social networks, which offer more and more content that users don’t care about. This is when we decided to create a noise-free network in which the development of the product revolves around user experience,”

beBee’s design puts you in control of your profile. As a user, you have the right to decide who can access your data. The company promises to eliminate middlemen and help data customers to pay the users directly, for each use of the user’s information, or content, for any purpose.

Work with ‘hives’ and ‘honey’

beBee users connect through hives, which are small communities within the network. Each hive is based on a specific interest where you can connect with other like-minded people. The interests can range from a variety of topics including marketing, sales, business operations and so forth.

Users join in as ‘bees’. Each time you submit content or engage with the platform, you’re ‘producing honey.’ The content you submit, ‘honey,’ builds your profile and connects with other users who share similar interests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxTq_OZA02Y

Can beBee keep its users ‘hooked’?

beBee is using the Other People’s Network (OPN) growth hacking strategy to increase its customer base. The company used LinkedIn extensively to attract users. For instance, an already existing user can send a connection request to his contacts on LinkedIn asking them to join beBee.

These connection requests sent via LinkedIn act as an external trigger. Such a notification encourages users to place their trust in the new platform, which is beBee in this case.

beBee’s product leverages the famous ‘Hooked’ model to collect users in hives. As Nir Eyal defines it, the hook model is designed to create habit-forming behavior in users via a looping cycle that consists of a trigger, an action, a variable reward, and investment. Gennaro from fourweekmba explains how the hook model works in beBee’s case:

PC: fourweekmba

Unlike most other social networking platforms, beBee allows an unlimited organic reach and assures you will always reach 100% of your followers. The platform runs on a machine learning based affinity algorithm. beBee’s social media model helps users build professional relationships with maximum affinity using artificial intelligence algorithms.

beBee’s innovative offers and networking opportunities helped it pick up 10M users in its very first year. As of April 2018, around 12M people have registered with beBee.

What’s in store for beBee?

The networking platform is building an ecosystem that makes payments for a professional’s data more transparent and seamless. The platform removes intermediaries to facilitate transparent interactions between professionals and businesses.

Organizations will be able to scrutinize profiles by checking an individual’s reputation on beBee and directly make customized offers. For instance, if you are a recruiter hiring for a reputed company, you can check the candidates’ complete profile on the platform. Using recommendations and engagement you can assess the person’s reputation and contact them directly on beBee’s platform.

At a time when major networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter are facing regulatory pressure to protect customers’ privacy, beBee comes as a breath of fresh air. beBee’s partnership with Profede allows it to offer you incentives in form of crypto-tokens, when you share your data. The platform protects your privacy at the same time. It runs in compliance with regulations ePrivacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

You could be looking for a new job opportunity, or as a recruiter, for the next best employee. BeBee offers you a new and better alternative to increase your professional network and build relationships with your peers.

The post LinkedIn ‘beBee’ like: This Startup Lets You Control Your Data Online appeared first on Techweek.

In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica shut down. An avalanche of media reports and mass outrage over how it harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent has taken the firm down. While Facebook, the trusted diary and yearbook of people around the world, is as much to blame, it has emerged unscathed – perhaps with a band-aid covering Twitter’s #DeleteFacebook rebellion.

But as the media reports were coming in hot and fast, Cambridge Analytica released a statement that claimed that it “has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas.”

There may be some truth in this statement as data harvesting has become a multi-million dollar industry. With Facebook and Google controlling most of the internet – search, email, video, web browsers, advertising, social networks and more, their online dominance is complete.

But led by privacy campaigners, there has been a significant ignition in internet privacy concerns. In such a scenario, it would be more apt for any reporter to ask, not what are you protecting me from, but how are you protecting me?

Picture Courtesy: DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo, the search engine with the ludicrous name, has some answers.

Not A Quack

CEO, Gabriel Weinberg worked on various successful and unsuccessful startup ideas – an educational software company, Learnection, a social networking company, NamesDatabase, a Meetup.com competitor – before the search engine. He started working on DuckDuckGo in 2007 as a side project to improve his own Google results, remove spam, and add instant answers form sites like Wikipedia or IMDB.

In 2008, he put out a question for the tech community on Hacker seeking feedback on what people thought of the search engine. The results were mixed: Some people hated it, found the UI visually invasive; some loved it, many asked him to change the name, but most complimented his “balls” for competing with the mighty Google.  

By 2010, Weinberg says, “the iterative work was done” and “something clicked” which made people start using it. By then, the search engine had 33,209 daily queries.

2011 was a landmark year. He raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures and also pulled a PR stunt.

The Philadelphia-based, solo search engine creator put up a billboard in San Francisco, Google’s backyard, saying, “Google tracks you. We don’t.” 

PC: Forbes

Naturally, it made for a great story and publications like Wired and USA Today covered it. The traffic kept rising and by the end of 2011, DuckDuckGo had over 250,000 daily searches. In 2012, they saw a huge uptick when Google changed their privacy policy to allow tracking across all their properties.

But a singular incident helped the company catapult into success. In June 2013, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA spying and overnight, millions of Americans were grief-stricken about privacy. DuckDuckGo’s daily searches hit a high of 1.5 million. In September and November 2014, Safari and Firefox included it as a search engine option. Since then, partnerships have been an integral part of DuckDuckGo’s success. It is also a built-in search option within Samsung’s Internet browsers, along with Vivaldi, Tor, and within Brave private tabs, among others.

In April 2018, DuckDuckGo recorded 25 million daily searches as compared to Google’s 3.5 billion. While people have complained that DuckDuckGo’s search results are sometimes out-of-context and not localised enough, most admire its growth, remembering Google’s unremarkable beginning.

Private Browsing

Google has built a over $600 billion dollar empire with your information. It has been accused of favouring its own pages or a certain political ideology in its search results. Ideally, browsing should be an anonymous and private activity, but Google has trackers: it uses ads that follow you, and your data remains with the company indefinitely. It may not be legal for anyone to store your data but the courts and government can legally seek it, and they do. Most of us know nothing about this aggregation and sharing because we agree to their terms and conditions, reading which would take us 76 days, reading eight hours a day.

Unfortunately, the industry precedent has been to violate our privacy while leaving all the hard work of changing browser settings, blocking cookies, using ad-block software, virtual private networks, and others, on us. It’s not just Facebook or Google, at least 79 percent of websites globally, according to a 2017 study by Ghostery,  have one or more trackers that collect data on their users’ online behavior.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Picture Courtesy: DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo claims not to store any search history. This means, that even if the government or a multinational company asked them to hand over data about users, they couldn’t. They haven’t stored it. Additionally, DuckDuckGo doesn’t log IP addresses or user agents; it uses default encryption modeled on HTTPS everywhere and doesn’t use cookies by default. It also uses a Tor exit enclave which prevents websites from knowing that you visited them at all.  

So how does DuckDuckGo make money? Weinberg explains that it is a myth that you need to track people to make money in web search. Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword search, i.e. type in car and get a car ad. These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent.

Weinberg says the company also makes money from affiliate links to sites like Amazon and eBay. The company doesn’t disclose numbers but Forbes reported that its revenue is more than $1 million. DuckDuckGo is different in other aspects too. The Philadelphia-based startup doesn’t propagate the Silicon-valley corporate culture. Half of its team works remotely from all over the world.

DuckDuckGo has been operational for about a decade now and it has taken major steps to raise the standard of privacy online. Its blogs, newsletters, and social media feed indulge in a lot of privacy education, explaining, for example, that it is not enough for a search engine/website to collect data anonymously, it has to stop collecting.

However, the biggest testament to DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy is its philanthropy. Since 2011, the startup has donated $800,000 to non-profits working to spread internet privacy, and outdid itself in March 2018, with a campaign to donate $5 million.

The post Hey Google, DuckDuckGo reached 25 million daily searches appeared first on Techweek.