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Cliqz is shutting down

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Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#41

Post by jszymborski »

solso wrote: post #38
throwaway914892 wrote: post #13

Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google. Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch. Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a…

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where…

Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be?

I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#42

Post by yellowapple »

ddevault wrote: post #2

Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

Agreed 100%. The article presents a whitewashed rose-tinted picture of Cliqz that's very different from reality, and it's alarming that its (former) employees continue to propagate that reality distortion even beyond the existence of Cliqz itself.

The browser and search engine were a front for the "offers", plain and simple. The whole premise was Orwellian to its core; war was peace, freedom was slavery, ignorance was strength, and tracking was privacy.

I sympathize with the newly-displaced employees facing the grim prospects of finding work in a fractured labor market. Hopefully they'll all have a chance to put their skills toward more honest ventures.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#43

Post by yellowapple »

solso wrote: post #38
throwaway914892 wrote: post #13

Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google. Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch. Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a…

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where…

> Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google.

Using Google's browser as the basis for one's own browser is certainly an interesting way to "fight" against Google.

Much like how collecting ad performance / analytics data from users is an interesting way to achieve privacy as a "strict design requirement".

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#44

Post by yellowapple »

dorkwood wrote: post #8

Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud. A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and t…

Cliqz sounds like an adware/spyware company from the late 90's / early 00's. Except instead of a purple gorilla, we got a web browser.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#45

Post by yellowapple »

solso wrote: post #25
dessant wrote: post #6

> Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. > A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development. A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better…

Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did. Cliqz search was never on par wit…

> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."

Yep, real "client-side", eh?

Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#48

Post by solso »

jszymborski wrote: post #41
solso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where…

Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be? I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on…

Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them.

Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off.

In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#49

Post by solso »

yellowapple wrote: post #43
solso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-) "The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where…

> Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. Using Google's browser as the basis for one's own browser is certainly an interesting way to "fight" against Google. Much like how collecting ad performance / analytics data from users is an interesting way to achieve privacy as a "strict design requirement".

Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with the [meta]searchers. But the code is open, and can be forked at will (there are some caveats to that claim, licences, internal APIs, etc.)

You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy, it's how you do it that matters, becomes a design requirement. Collecting a url visited, can lead to build a user history (privacy hazard) or not. It's an design choice. The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage (for anyone curios we did publish plenty of material on the topic, https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...)

Re: Cliqz is shutting down

#50

Post by solso »

yellowapple wrote: post #45
solso wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did. Cliqz search was never on par wit…

> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox : "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webp…

This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."

Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue.

UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit.

There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.

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