Privacy in Action: Matthew Benchimol, Founder and Developer of Curated News

An interview with Startpage user and privacy expert Matt Benchimol.

Today, we want to highlight Startpage user Matt Benchimol! We love hearing from the Startpage community. If you would like to participate or nominate someone for our Privacy in Action series, let us know on social media.

Matthew Benchimol is the Founder and Developer of Curated News, an aggregation platform that serves misinformation proof news without compromising democratic values. Previously, Matthew served as a Military Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Army and an academic in the field of Political Science. In his free time, he volunteers at a non-profit coding bootcamp that helps Veteran’s break into the technology sector. 

Interview with Matt Benchimole:

Startpage: One a scale of 1 to 10, how private are you?

Matt Benchimol: I’d say I am a 10. This isn’t because I’m some sort of privacy radical. I firmly believe privacy is part of a rolling social contract. I get to decide what part of my life becomes public. The threat or breach of someone’s privacy is enough to change their behavior in largely unstable ways. It’s not a question of having something to hide. Its a question of being forced to change your behavior in ways that are conducive to social control and not well-being. 

Startpage: Why is privacy important to you? In your personal, academic, and professional life?

Matt Benchimol: I think privacy is important to me because political life is fragile. We tend to see society as this robust mechanism that just works. We have a lot of proof that it works. We also have a lot of proof that societies without privacy are extremely dystopian. This is largely because political life extends to features like civic engagement, morality, and values. Let me put it this way: your personal life can’t exist as personal without privacy, your academic research can’t be at its best when its constantly being subverted by behaviorial changes due to privacy flucuations, and your professional life can’t remain separate from your political life when political life becomes a form of professionalization.

Startpage: Are you secretly an anthropologist? Tell us more about your academic background.

Matt Benchimol: I have always been fascinated by Anthropology and even minored in it during undergrad. My academic background started as Pre-Law, grew into International Relations, and finalized in Political Methodology. In a lot of ways, my academic background was a stepping stone towards finding myself. I secretly gravitate towards endeavors that don’t tell you what to think but give you the tools to think differently. It has paid dividends. 

Startpage: What prompted you to develop Curated News? Can you tell us more about it and how it provides unbiased news?

Matt Benchimol: Curated News is a platform I designed to increase information quality and strengthen consumption habits. I focused on the biggest culprit of misinformation: the news. I developed a disaggregated statistical methodology that does what Facebook, its Artificial Intelligence (AI), and dedicated staff does at a fraction of the cost without compromising democratic values. In fact, it is designed to produce and increase civic engagement, morality, and values. Instead of focusing on bias, Curated News focuses on statistical independence between news sources. Major news organzations anticipate strategies and informational states based on one another. When one major news outlet covers a given story, a rival tries to one-up or provide more nuance to the coverage. Over time, a massive informational separation occurs between information as it exists and information as it is covered during its life cycle. Major news outlets say they aren’t biased because they’re not. They are just too big and too dominate. In order to remain competitive, they have to change their audience’s informational flow state and this becomes harder and harder to do without being destructive. Curated News does not include Big News conglomerates on its platform as one part of its misinformation proof framework.

Startpage: What do you consider the biggest threat to privacy? To misinformation?

Matt Benchimol: The biggest threat to privacy I have identified is ad-tracking. Corporations collect a massive amount of data. The more they collect, the more they can convince advertisers their money should be spent marketing on their platform. Unfortunately, this data can also be bought by major news networks to manipulate behavior to increase audience engagement, especially when it comes to news coverage. The easiest way to get people addicted to information in order to change their information flow state is scandal. It evokes outrage and starts a contagion of moral superiority. Outrage is normally a healthly emotional state. When its contrived, it can lead to volatile and unpredictable behaviors. The greater irony here is just how deeply outrage is attached to privacy. A lot of outrage culture stems from social behaviors like gossip where someone’s private information is put on public display for scrutiny and judgement, leading to scandal. The entire ecosystem we’ve constructed for political life is centered around problems of privacy.

Startpage: Startpage is the world’s first private search engine! What do you think of private search engines? What are features you’d like private search engines to have?

Matt Benchimol: Private search engines are a mainstay for keeping human behavior human. Think about the kinds of things you search for when you are looking for cataloged information to access: medical conditions, fears and insecurities, and even basic questions you probably shouldn’t be asking because you honestly know the answer to them. I can almost guarantee no one wants their search engine searches to become public or to be used to manipulate their behavior. To point a fact, if we are searching for tips and tricks on how to alleviate our fears and insecurities and a search engine associates that to its users, you are essentially giving someone the blue-book on how to destroy you psychologically. I have personally vetted StartPage and it is the best search engine on the market. All search engines need to be secure from manipulation. This is even more important than privacy. StartPage is one of the only private or non-private search engines on the market that uses DNSSEC.

Startpage: Do you use any privacy tools? If so, what are your favorite privacy tools?

Matt Benchimol:

• Search Engine: Startpage
• Browser: Cydog Browser
• Email: I don’t use any privacy tools when it comes to email.
• Messaging: Threema
• VPN: PIVPN with Pi-hole
• Password Manager: KeePassXC

Startpage: Do you have any other interesting ideas to share with us?

Matt Benchimol: You can’t have institutional trust without privacy because there are no zero trust systems in human behavior that actually produce democratic values. A feature of zero trust systems is they are constructed in such a way the sum total of its parts do not actually cause critical failure or insecurity when compromised even though they rely on each other to operate. When you threaten or take someone’s privacy, you cause compromise. I tell people to think about it this way: a therapist needs to gain your trust in order for therapy to work properly because it allows them to diagnose you correctly in the future. If your therapist violated your privacy, would you ever share something with a therapist again? Probably not. 

Startpage: Would you rather: Share your search history or live without internet for 1 week?

Matt Benchimol: This is the ultimate privacy question. No internet for a week. I have some books I need to finish.