StartPage and Ixquick Defy Surveillance Agenda, Surpass 6 Million Daily Searches

ZEIST, Netherlands - Dec. 1, 2015 - PRLog -- The world's most private search engines StartPage.com and Ixquick.com have surpassed a new milestone of 6 million daily searches. Privacy expert Dr. Katherine Albrecht, who works with the company, attributes the sites’ record growth to a new social consciousness and responsibility for privacy.

“There has been a ‘perfect storm’ of data breaches, corporations spying on consumers, and governments calling for backdoors to our personal communications. People are seeking shelter in trustworthy Internet services that do not bend to fear mongering,” she observed. “They know that excessive government power threatens our values and puts us all at greater risk, without making us safer.”

Albrecht cited a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation editorial in support of these views. (See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/baseless-calls-expand-surveillance-fit-familiar-cynical-pattern)

StartPage and Ixquick return search results in total privacy. They do not collect IP addresses, use tracking cookies, or collect any personal information. Since they are based in Europe, they offer the crucial protection of being outside U.S. jurisdiction, where they are not subject to the Patriot Act and other U.S. data collection mandates.

StartPage privately gives users actual Google search results, while Ixquick delivers equally private metasearch results from other top search engines. In both cases, users are invisible, since StartPage and Ixquick perform the searches on their behalf. The search engines also offer a free proxy with every search that lets users indirectly surf any website through StartPage and Ixquick servers as a protection from surveillance, malware, and cookies.

Privacy is a hot topic as consumers seek out alternative services to protect their personal information and online activities. The same people who developed StartPage and Ixquick recently developed the powerful encrypted email service StartMail.com, which is also growing tremendously, recently surpassing 10,000 paid subscribers.

“People do not want to live in a police state, and they’re defending their right to privacy in light of recent events,” Albrecht said. “They're worried about the government and companies siphoning their personal information, but they know they can trust StartPage and Ixquick since we've been serving them since 1999. Every day, we protect millions of people from surveillance by never storing their search data in the first place.”

About StartPage, Ixquick and StartMail

StartPage and its sister search engine Ixquick consistently outscore other search engines on security measures, and they are the only search engines to offer a free proxy service with every search. For more information, please visit StartPage.com or Ixquick.com.

StartMail.com is the paid, private email service that simplifies PGP encryption and makes state-of-the-art privacy protection easy and available to everyone. See why thousands of people have turned to StartMail by watching the video overview at https://www.StartMail.com and signing up for a free trial account.