[dessant]

I'm one of those people who remains skeptic about the anonymity of the tracking Cliqz does in general. Obviously people have a hard time believing any company that is in the advertising space and preaches about privacy, mainly because they have been burned several times before.

For me it was the data proxying through FoxyProxy that made me uncomfortable. I have also remained unconvinced about the motivation for not using Tor: because it is hard to integrate into extensions. Cliqz also has its own browser, not just an extension, where they could opt to use Tor, but they route through FoxyProxy.

You must find a way to make it technically impossible to identify users, a legal or business structure is not enough. It wouldn't be unheard of to secretly own the proxy company and relink user data.

[tschakkaMarc]

Well, we released our beta search for Tor yesterday: search4tor7txuze.onion/ (works obviously only in the Tor browser). That’s as good as it gets regarding making it technically impossible, isn’t it? More complex obviously for a browser - but the answer can simply not be „only no data at all is good“, because that’s a destructive approach that only favors the worst privacy intruders; no one would then be able to build up competition. We work hard to be as transparent as possible about what we do. Show me any other company that builds a big data product (like search) that is so transparent about „yes we collect data, but it’s non personal - here is how we do it, please scrutinize us“. Are we perfect? Hell no! But we try and we go a long way to be challenged to improve. If we were shady - would we be naked in front of you, showing each step we take? We would not even interact with the tech folks (especially not on hacker news, where people really know what they talk about), but scam people who know less (at least that sounds like a more reasonable strategy to me if I would want to fool people - which we don’t).

(EDIT/Disclaimer: I obviously work for Cliqz)

[dessant]

We appreciate your openness about how you collect data, but that's still not enough because literally every other advertising company is deceptive when they talk about privacy.

The openness must be paired with privacy that is guaranteed under all circumstances, and the most common way to achieve that would be to route the anonymized data through Tor.

Your search engine being also available on Tor has nothing to do with data collection by Cliqz on other sites. Your search engine website is not the avenue through which the Cliqz browser and extension collects data as you browse the web, I'm confused why would you even bring it up.

[kkm]

Hi dessant,

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.

Would be really interesting to know your concerns with FoxyProxy.FoxyProxy is legally bound to not log the IP or share it.

From the HPN protocol's perspective, data can be routed via any trusted party - in our case it's FoxyProxy.

Right now, there is no way to configure this in the Browser, but should be doable. It's actually one of the motivations to move to the newer version of HPN[1].

We do agree that sending data through Tor network is the gold standard for anonymity.

- We did a lot of work on getting Tor running in Cliqz browsers. It's a hard problem but definitely do-able, something we might pursue again in future[2]. - We also have experimented with WebAssembly version of Tor client to make it compatible for web extension[3].

Having the ability to use the Tor network in Cliqz products is also good, because we can actually leverage the anonymity guarantees by sending data via .onion services. You can also check more details under evaluation section of the paper[4].

In case you wish to check the network traffic you can also check the debugging section[5].

References:

1. https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network... 2. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/commit/12fcef8479d9c3... 3. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/commit/12fcef8479d9c3... 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.07927.pdf 5. https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-da...