You may be wondering a couple of questions about the Discover (homepage) feed of Kiwi Browser. Here we are going to share with you openly our thoughts and then you can decide if Discover is the right functionality for you.
How is the feed created ? - The Discover feed is mostly composed of news sourced by Google News. We've picked Google News because it has a very large coverage in terms of countries and location (Kiwi is used in over 160 countries and territories). In some countries, it's not that easy to have access to news, because news publishers have a very fragile ecosystem. By delegating this work to Google, we also avoid having to decide whether some news are fake news or not.
- As a bonus, Google News is sometimes adapting their news feed to display more relevant news if you are logged-in.
- However, by delegating this choice we let Google News decide. So if you see many news about one topic you don't like, or a politician that you don't like, it's not really our choice, but at the same time it's very difficult to find anyone neutral on this planet.
Why the feed exists in the first place ? - Of course, the goal of the developers of Kiwi Browser is to make you use a long as possible Kiwi Browser, and also, help you to feel better. In general, if you are bored and find content that is interesting for you then your browsing experience is better. It can often be the case where you get bored and don't want what to browse or do. The discover feed is made for that, to help you discover new content.
Why are there advertisements in the feed ? - We need money to pay for food, water and the team, here's more details:
- You'd be surprised how little money Kiwi Browser earns, what remains is barely enough to hire one developer (not even one in the US or in Estonia where we are based) and at much less salaries than what you'd see in other companies.
- One big reason why we don't earn money is because we don't sell any of the user data and we are not going to change that. A lot of the browsers (including the "privacy" browsers) are actually selling your user data and navigation. Kiwi Browser doesn't sell your data, and it's visible by the result and we are proud to have done differently of the other browsers and put the user interest in the first place.
- Kiwi Browser doesn't have any investor, and this independence guarantees that we don't have to rush after money.
- In some way (and genuinely!), advertisements can be a fun way to spend time when you are bored. Sometimes all you need is a MMORPG, or a mediation app, not a browser, and the advertisement is just bringing you motivation to do so.
Who provides the advertisements and what data do you send to the advertiser ? - The advertisements are mostly provided by Google AdMob. We do not send any data to Google about your browsing history or user profile in Kiwi so they have no clue what you are browsing. They just give us a little piece of code that we can use to display an ad.
- We do not have to send any data to Google; Google knows you better than we do (we have zero user profile).
Why is there no advertisement in my feed ? - Not all the countries have ads, and sometimes, Kiwi just won't show any ads in order to not disturb the user (for example, if you have an ad blocker, we may try not to disturb you with ads, and so on, though it's not guaranteed as it's a bit complex to put in place).
I don't want any ads - Fair enough, but keep in mind that if you keep the Discover feed active, it'd really show your support and it would help Kiwi to get developed and hire people. We're not a million dollar company with tons of developers. It's just one guy who quit his job to work full-time on developing a web browser, and he is helped by some very nice people who give their time for free or for very modest contribution.
- To disable Discover, all you need to do, is to press the menu button and "Turn off".
- Disabling the Discover feeds also disables the requests to Google AdMob and similar (as we said, it's just for rendering the ad, we don't have any agreement to sell data or anything like that).
Can my website appear in the news feed ?- Actually yes, please send an e-mail to [email protected] and we can look together what can be done. Don't worry too much about the money, sometimes it's just cool to showcase projects that people do :)
To you, you, the person who read all this text, I want to say: Thank You for using Kiwi and supporting our work on the behalf of the people who work on Kiwi Browser. Arnaud and the contributors. |
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