I occasionally get trolled around my previous company, Opobox, an early social networking company that I ran from 2003-2006. As far as I can tell, the trolling theme is that since I ever was associated with any kind of social networking company, that somehow taints me/DuckDuckGo. It's purpose was to help reunite old friends and classmates, and it actually helped develop my privacy views and practices for what became DuckDuckGo.

For example we did what I think were some innovative things:

--We collected the minimum amount of information possible.

--Allowed people to automatically remove all their minimal information permanently with one click or email.

--Actually charged money as a business model instead of using advertising.

--Never worked with any third-parties in terms of data targeting (and didn't need to since that wasn't our business model).

Of course, these also made the company ultimately not able to compete in the space, which was completely subsumed by Facebook.

I took these privacy ideas to DuckDuckGo, though, and realized in the case of Web search the minimum amount of information needed is actually zero. Hence, our privacy policy.