| A quick skimming of those PDFs found no mentions of "anolysis." Your colleague claimed that papers were going to be released "soon" on it. It's been at least two years since you started using it, so why hasn't there been yet? It does not take long to find references of the name on the source code. No references in any of your published source code, and your search engine isn't free software: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acliqz-oss+anolysis Honestly, if someone tells you that anolysis means anonymous + analysis, why do you not believe it? Cliqz has done unsavory things in the past (like the Firefox fiasco a few years back, for example, which I can't fault Cliqz entirely for: Mozilla is just as guilty). On a separate note, as a company (Cliqz) that offers anti-tracking and ad-blocking, I can tell you that blocklists are a bit more sophisticated than that. "anolysis" gets around both uBlock Origin and uMatrix, despite both of them automatically blacklisting any URL with "analytics" in it, as an example. Getting around the most popular content filterers on the internet is a pretty strong signal. |
You looked at the wrong tab, check in "Code" to find "code" related to Anolysis: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acliqz-oss+anolysis&type=Co...
> Cliqz has done unsavory things in the past (like the Firefox fiasco a few years back, for example, which I can't fault Cliqz entirely for: Mozilla is just as guilty).
Not sure how this is Cliqz' fuck-up. We are not hiding anything. On the contrary we are very transparent and detailed about how everything we do is designed to not track users. All of this is on our new tech blog: https://0x65.dev, feel free to have a look between two comments on HN and give us some feedback!
> "anolysis" gets around both uBlock Origin and uMatrix, despite both of them automatically blacklisting any URL with "analytics" in it, as an example. Getting around the most popular content filterers on the internet is a pretty strong signal.
It's not called "getting around it" when there is no tracking or ads going on (if you want to see how smart the "most popular content filterers are" check out this link and see that the image is blocked because it contains the substring: "analytics": https://whotracks.me/blog/private_analytics.html. Wicked smart!).
Anolysis is not a typo, it's a project name, people tend to do that when they care and spend a lot of time on projects: give them names. So, at the risk of repeating myself, Anolysis = Analysis + Anonymous (at the time we thought it was a pretty neat name!).
Anolysis does not operate outside of Cliqz products (no websites analytics here and we do not rely on a third-party, we built it in-house for this reason) and we put a lot of work into it to make sure it does not use a unique ID (like virtually every other analytics out there) but allows to by-design not track any single user (in fact the system does not even have the concept of a user). Sure, we did not write extensively about it but I guess we have to start somewhere (in December we are writing on 24 different things we do, we will be sure to consider Anolysis as a good candidate for a technical blog post in the future).
What you attribute to malice is simply a lack of time, as you probably noticed Cliqz is working on solving a lot of very hard problems (search, browsers, antitracking, adblocking, privacy-preserving telemetry and so much more) and writing a paper about the new system you designed and implemented is not always the priority :)