As the reach of the Internet has grown, so has the medium’s favored business model: targeted advertising. Signals recording our activity are harvested as we browse the Web and, increasingly, as we use our smartphones. That information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads, and opting out is rarely easy.
Some small companies are now redesigning smartphones and Web browsers to give people more control over that kind of data collection. The founders of these startups claim that many people want an alternative to the data-slurping status quo, and that services such as search engines can be run profitably without harvesting much data.
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