Safe from Prism: "Found you pay with your data"

Protection from Prism and tenses: The company allows Surfboard Holding with his services Ixquick and Startpage Search the internet without a trace. For a few euros, it also wants to offer encrypted mails.

Large-scale Internet surveillance by intelligence agencies has startled many network users. Some people now looking for ways to recoup a bit of privacy - or discrete search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ixquick, the user data neither save nor sell, are booming. The Ixquick makers want this model soon spread to the e-mail traffic.

The reports of the monitoring programs Prism and tenses bring the little Google's competitors a boom. "We currently have around four million searches a day," says Jörg Bauer, project manager for the German speaking area in the search engine Ixquick and Startpage. Before the former NSA employee Edward Snowden had made ​​the monitoring programs in public, there were only half as many hits. "It's extremely up," he says. "Especially in the U.S., where the fear of the data is larger." Nevertheless, Google and Bing continue traveling in other dimensions.

The business model of anonymous search in the network, the company wants, which belongs to the Dutch Surfboard Holding, soon spread to the e-mail traffic. Start mail is the offer that is currently in the U.S. in the beta testing phase. The idea: Start Mail provides the infrastructure for uninterrupted e-mail traffic - nothing else. There should be no evaluation of the news, not advertising marketing, data collection, no user profiles.

"The demand was there longer," says Alex van Eesteren, Project Manager at Start-mail. For two years he and his team are working on the mail system. "The case Snowden has only accelerated the matter."

When writing emails threatens not only the danger that the messages are intercepted by intelligence agencies. Many providers of free email addresses, analyze advertising messages on relevant content, create user profiles and save them for advertising purposes. A secret it does not make the provider - they can allow in the terms and conditions. However, it often makes for discomfort.