(co-founder here) a bit of a cheap shot :( ...

We strive to earn our users trust every day. We read every piece of feedback that comes in and try to make the product better. At the end of the day, we only make money if our users use our product and opt to pay for it, so our incentives are as aligned with our users as they can be.

I agree that that was a bit of a cheap shot, but in an environment where Facebook, Google and the like are harvesting every last bit of data they can scrape together on every "user" on earth to package and sell, the decision to bundle a VPN and a password manager with a search offering, whether it's paid for or not, seems like it's forcing folks to put a lot more trust in your relatively unknown company than they put in either Facebook or Google.

FWIW, I do think the idea of a paid search utility is a good one, especially if I found it somehow better than Google, but I'd love to hear the reasoning behind the decision to include those services as part of the offering.

For what it's worth, nothing about your response helped. This crowd has a fairly well-tuned bullshit meter when it comes to venture-backed companies. Your incentives are aligned to your investors, as they probably should be. The parent makes a good point that your backgrounds in monetizing user data is concerning, given that history has a way of repeating itself.

Right, but the implication of your background lends one to question, is the user part of the product?

Google and Youtube are advertisers who monetized search queries and content consumption of their users as the end result of their product.

You've not addressed the core of the argument whereby you admit and extol your previous experience, but neglect to decry the actions the company took while you were there.

You want to have control of the flow of information, but you are not a charity and not opposed to reimagining a product to better monetize it.

That’s unfair.

Gotta give people a chance.