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Ethics and transparency: How does Qwant respect your privacy?

At Qwant, protecting your privacy is an integral part of our DNA and our commitments.

18 September 2023
3min

At Qwant, protecting your privacy is an integral part of our DNA and our commitments. Every time we imagine a new feature, service or partnership, we wonder how best to do it without collecting or transmitting any personal data. When this is not technically possible, we work to apply the strictest measures to this data to prevent it from being misused to track you, or to make personalized and targeted advertising.

We don’t want to change our results based on your gender, revenue, age or political views, and the advertisers we work with are those who understand the importance of not discriminating against our users and therefore accept and adopt this ethical approach of respecting their customers by not seeking to intrude on their privacy to sell them more.

These commitments have always been ours, long before the European Parliament adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We want to go as far as possible in preserving the confidentiality of your research, which is your sole business, and apply with the utmost rigor the legal principles set out by the GDPR.

We are convinced that Qwant must be exemplary both in terms of legal rigour in the interpretation of the European text, and transparency on all the processing that we must operate to show you the results you expect. The trust you place in us must be based on a real knowledge of the few data that Qwant and its partners must receive to provide the services requested, and the measures we implement to prevent them from being misused and used, for example, for advertising profiling or targeted political marketing, which we refuse in all circumstances.

We owe you this standard of sincerity, accuracy and transparency. This is why you can read in our new Privacy Policy that we refuse to claim that the data processed by Qwant is all “anonymized”, unlike other competing services that never explain how this same data is supposedly anonymized.

After exchanges on this subject with the CNIL and its experts, after having taken the full measure of the very strict criteria imposed by the European authorities In order to be able to say that data is made perfectly and forever “anonymous” (without being able to bring it closer to the same user), it seemed more accurate to us to say that the data on which we apply our measures to protect your privacy is “pseudonymized”.

In practice, we have not changed a single line of code and we do not process any additional data. Our commitments to you remain firm and strictly identical: we do not do personalized advertising, we preserve the neutrality of our search results, we do not do profiling related to your search history. And you have access to all the details about the data we need and what we do to ensure that this commitment to protecting your privacy is fully respected.

We owe you this transparency and sincerity on this subject as on others. Believe that this is part of our commitments for today and for the future.

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