[pythux]

Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think your comment is accurate.

1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.

[ktjfl]

1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse.

2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.

[pythux]

Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document: https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...

[jammygit]

Is there something a person could do to objectively settle the disagreeing statements about what Cliqz was sent? Your document there is impressive, but Firefox was fairly explicit in its statement. We're in a case of he said she said

I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system

[pbhjpbhj]

How does Cliqz make money?

FWIW it sounds [#] exactly like a scummy advertising company - I'd address that if the company is not getting revenue through placements or advertising at all.

I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.

# Edit: I mean the name, I don't know the company.

[pythux]

> How does Cliqz make money?

We're currently proposing a mix of client-side private offers (not unlike Brave) and paid products (e.g.: Ghostery premium, and more are being worked on as we speak). Users should have a choice.

> I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.

No. That means that we do not collect personal data. And being able to do so took (and still takes) a lot of research and careful design.

[pbhjpbhj]

>client-side private offers

What's that mean, it sounds like you mean "advertising with discounts in?", not sure what "offers" means if that's not it?

Brave browser has advertising, so it sounds like you're saying your income _will_ come from ads?

That's not an awful thing, so it's weird you're not up front about it??

[pythux]

Since it was literally the first thing I said in my answer, I consider it pretty up-front. I'm happy to give you more details about it since you seem interested. The basic idea is this:

1. All clients download a database of offers locally (they are basically vouchers, we call them offers because they have the potential to make users save money).

2. While browsing with this feature enabled, URLs of pages as well as some other information accessible locally are processed by the extension which tries to detect the intent of buying something online.

3. When an intent corresponding to one of the items in the local database is found, an offer is shown with a coupon that can be used to save money.

What sets it apart from ads in my opinion is that everything happens client-side and that the offer is only shown when there is a clear intent to buy something (instead of all pages with traditional ads). This means that users will actually see very few of them, but that they should be very relevant and useful (you save money).

[mlinksva]

This seems similar to how Firefox Directory Tiles worked, except when/where the ad was presented to the user (new tab page in the FF DT instance). I thought it was a good idea, and I'm pretty skeptical of advertising (tax ads is my preference). I don't think trying to call it not ads gets you anywhere though, other than lost credibility.

[pmoriarty]

"Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected."

Are you audited by any independent, respected privacy watchdog organizations to make sure that you're adhering to your published policies?

If not, how can I be sure that you're doing what you say you are?

Also, even ostensibly non-personally-identifying data can be de-anonymized.[1]

The only way to be sure that your data can't be used against you is for it not to be collected in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deanonymization

[Vinnl]

Wow, someone from Cliqz! I always wondered: hasn't your company name been tainted too much? It might be because of the circles I'm in, but Cliqz has become synonymous with "privacy invasion", and though I know it's often misrepresented, that's some bad branding for a company focused on selling privacy tools. Is this seen as a problem internally?

[pythux]

Hi, due to few factually incorrect posts, Cliqz is often seen as a privacy invasive tool (at least in some circles), on the contrary we care a lot about users' privacy and continuously develop technologies to help users and other developers adopt privacy by design. Yes, this is sometimes seen as a problem internally and it's very disheartening when people label the products without actually taking a look at what it's doing. There are a lot of people at Cliqz who care very deeply about privacy and we put a lot of hard work into what we do, to make sure it's done right. But as long as we get a chance to explain and discuss what we are doing and why, it is not "too tainted".

[Vinnl]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope you do actually manage to improve our privacy :)