Privacy browser acquired by advertising company that invested in Startpage

Waterfox, an open source privacy web browser, appears to have been acquired by System1, a US-based advertising company. Earlier, a division of that company took over the privacy-friendly search engine Startpage. According to the creator of Waterfox, no information is shared.

The acquisition was noticed by some Reddit users, who saw in a UK Companies House filing that the director of System1 was named as the new director of Waterfox on December 13, 2019. At the same time, Alex Kontos stepped down as director.

Reddit users state that nothing about the takeover has been reported by System1 and Waterfox. The users did find a vacancy from System1 for a browser developer from October 2019. This vacancy shows that the company was looking for a developer to work on an open source web browser.

For his part, Alex Kantos said he had a blog post planned for Friday, and that he “hasn’t announced anything yet because nothing is going to change,” preferring to take the time to provide a more in-depth explanation of the acquisition. to write.

In addition, he writes that no information is shared with System1, because there is nothing to share. He states that System1 is only involved as a ‘search syndication partner’, by which he means that the company functions as an intermediary with Bing, the current standard search engine of Waterfox. According to Kantos, this was not possible without System1 because Microsoft does not do business with small businesses. “You may have noticed that Waterfox has partnered with Bing, Ecosia, and Startpage. That’s the capacity System1 is involved in.”

According to Kantos, nothing will change. He hereby calls on users to keep an eye on the source code, since Waterfox is open source. He also indicates that he is still fully involved in the project, although he is no longer working as a director.

In October last year, it became clear that System1 had made an investment in the privacy-friendly search engine Startpage through its division, the Privacy One Group. This state of affairs was criticized because neither Startpage nor System1 said how big the investment was and what part of the search engine was in the hands of the advertising company. The influential website PrivacyTools.io subsequently removed Startpage from its list of recommended search engines.