[garaetjjte]

I didn't say it is absolutely inappropriate to collect any user data, it could be ok after obtaining explicit user permission. Firefox experiment installed data collection add-on to random users without opt-in, and I still cannot understand why you thought that was good idea.

>That is impossible - to us, each single URL comes as a detached datapoint

IPs could be used to aggregate those datapoints, and you obviously cannot avoid receiving these. It is only promises that you or your proxy provider doesn't store them. (though maybe it is possible to implement P2P mangling network? encrypt UDP data packet, send to randomly selected peer discovered from DHT, peer delivers it to your server. Or directly send UDP packet with spoofed source address, but this is not possible for browser sitting behind NAT)

[tschakkaMarc]

There were extensive tests with opt-in before (Testpilot), but these are super biased towards techies/enthusiasts (by definition if you read HN or use Testpilot you’re not representative ...). At some point you need to both test and get data from more mass market and that would never work with opt-in. Hence the scrutiny about not even technically be able to do record linkage etc. And some of the measures you mentioned are/were applied (we post about this in the next days).

I also stick to my original point: those users who had cliqz had significantly more privacy than those without.

Having said that: I don’t think, you and me are that far away from each other. But: If we, who care about privacy constantly criticize or even shout at those who also care about privacy, those who build better products, but maybe don’t follow an idealistic “no data at all paradigm”, then we will always end with the worst data collectors, because non of the alternatives will ever have a chance (or people get frustrated and decide they can make more money at Google or ad tech).

By the way, we have a post about data and how we collect it in our blog today: https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil... - you might find it interesting).

In any case thanks for challenging us. I don’t believe we’re perfect. But we’re trying!

[tschakkaMarc]

And here are all details how we remove all personal information with a technology we call Human Web: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-i...

We love to get scrutinized and get feedback on this - we’re very serious about privacy.