It's hard to take their "privacy by design" seriously. It is the same Cliqz that partnered before with Mozilla to run "experiment" exfiltrating browsing history (!) of 1% of new installs in Germany: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i... I thought Mozilla would loss all their credibility after this, but somehow they still market as privacy-focused..
Hi, Marc from Cliqz. This one haunts us (in HN and also in my dreams). Let's first get one thing clear: It was a terrible blog post. Second: The 1% who had Cliqz installed were actually safer than the ones without. Why? If you use a (most) browsers every keystroke in the URL bar gets send to Google. This is how autosuggest works. This was and is the case with Firefox also. Cliqz in the functionally implemented in Firefox was not that different. Except - it comes with privacy by design: We actually proxied those requests to not get the IP, we take special measures to not collect private data in the first place. And all this was tested and scrutinized a lot before and after the test. And if you don't trust it or believe it, it also happened to be open source. In the end, you were better off with Cliqz than without. Third (and maybe most importantly): If you don't support anyone who "collects" data, even if they do it in the most transparent way, without collecting any private information, in fact going a long way to delete all PII, open-source and with privacy by design, someone who has no business model built on collecting profiles, then you only criticize Google, but will never have an alternative or only alternatives that white label those that do collect all data. Because building a search without data is impossible. We were hoping that together with Firefox we would build a better solution. For some reasons this didn't work out, but lack of privacy was never one of them (lack of a business model more so, because sending every key press to some is more profitable than others, regardless of how private each is). In fact, our way of doing things is much more private than most people out there who claim to be private. This includes most browsers and search engines. And all of this is open source, so verifiable. And while we speak about it: In our blog https://0x65.dev we will over the next 24 days publish pieces on what we do and why we do it and why it is important, data collection and anonymization will be a big part of this. Last not least: All this is clearly not your fault, so my rant might be inappropriate, but as I said, this thing haunts us for the wrong reasons. (Me and the team are happy to answer any questions).