Privacy, Please: This Is Only for the Two of Us

The secrecy was welcome. We weren’t cluttering up anyone else’s feeds on Twitter, and didn’t have to worry about random high school friends seeing and commenting on our exchanges on Facebook. In addition, there were gestures distinct to the app. It let us share information about our locations, and to exchange doodles, to-do lists and virtual nudges — all conveying that “I’m thinking about you.”

The app highlights the best elements of social networking — the warm, fuzzy feeling of being connected to people you care about when you’re physically nowhere near them. And it says it eliminates some of the worst — the worry about who can see the content you’re posting and how they may interpret it.

Apparently, venture capitalists also see the point: The company that developed Pair raised $4.2 million in seed funding from a group of early investors last month.

Pair is arriving as many of us are looking to use the Web and our phones much as we always have, but outside of the very public arenas of the social Web. It’s a natural evolution of social networking, especially as Facebook and Twitter have swelled.

The combination of privacy and intimate sharing has never looked so good — provided that it can be achieved. A handful of start-ups are appealing to users who may be tired of the social spotlight but still enjoy the whimsy of apps.

“We’ve spent the last decade struggling with this,” said Andrea Matwyshyn, an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Companies are trying to figure out the relationship of privacy to users while also trying to provide personalization and customization of their services.”

Even the largest social networking sites sense a rising tide of awareness about the need to protect delicate and personal information that is shared about users online. Last month, Twitter announced that it was introducing a “do not track” feature that lets users keep Twitter from collecting personal information as they move around the Web. The feature isn’t perfect — it works only on third-party sites that agree to acknowledge it.

“People can’t always foresee or understand what could happen to their data,” Professor Matwyshyn said. “But they know they don’t want it ending up in the wrong hands.”

Companies that do figure out how to embed privacy into a social service could gain a business and marketing advantage — positioning themselves as safer spaces to share and exchange information.

“We should encourage Web and mobile services to lead with their privacy practices and let users vote with their feet,” wrote Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York, in a recent blog post. Mr. Wilson is an investor in Duck Duck Go, a search engine that says it doesn’t keep track of a user’s search history.

Gabriel Weinberg, one of the creators of Duck Duck Go, says it has been able to carve out a niche audience despite the dominance of juggernauts like Google and Bing. Last month, the site performed 45 million searches, and Mr. Weinberg predicts that next month the figure will inch toward 50 million.