Earlier this week, Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of Paoli-based DuckDuckGo, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on data privacy regulations and its impacts on competition and innovation, writes Roberto Torres for Technical.ly Philly.

During his testimony, Weinberg emphasized that it is possible to run a profitable digital business based on ads without tracking and leveraging the personal data of users. He cited his own privacy-minded search engine as an example, saying it has been profitable since 2014 and brought in more than $25 million in revenue last year.

“In many ways, I come to you from the future: I run a business that is already GDPR- and CCPA- compliant,” he said. “Our privacy policy is straightforward. We simply do not collect or share any personal information at all.”

He also said that to restore competition and innovation in the digital-ad market, which is heavily dominated by Google and Facebook, it is necessary to address that duopoly. He listed several ways this could be done, including allowing consumers to opt out of online tracking and to prohibit monopoly platforms from combining data across different business lines.

Read more about Gabriel Weinberg’s testimony at Technical.ly Philly here.

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