[jarcane]

But you are mistaken.

Increasingly buried underneath all the big talk about privacy and the blog spam, is the fact that Cliqz also is an advertising company: https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/press-release-cliqz-introduces...

They've literally resurrected the ad-riddled browser toolbar: https://myoffrz.com/en/

My bet is spinning off their own browser has nothing to do with anything but fear the browser vendors, Firefox and Chrome alike, will start blocking their real money maker.

This is not even a new strategy. Other companies have tried similar tricks over the years too, though most of them went with Chromium forks instead for their spy/adware laden wares.

Frankly, it's disappointing to see this even on here, but I don't blame anyone for it; they are really working hard to sugar up the pitch here.

[mfer]

There is a point in there I think you're missing. That is Google is an advertising company. Isn't it hypocritical to have an issue with Cliqz for being an advertising company while being OK with Chrome which is from an advertising company (Google)?

If posts from Google and Chrome are OK for hacker news then why not from others with similar business models?

I'm not attempting to say that Cliqz has an OK model. I'm suggesting self examination and consistency.

[CmdrKrool]

Indeed, Cliqz appears to have a weirdly close, Pocket-like relationship with Mozilla. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History), in 2017 Cliqz was bundled in with Firefox for 1% of users downloading the latter (from Mozilla's own website, presumably) in Germany. This was despite that "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", and "text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent". HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708

[mirimir]

Thanks for that.

I was thinking about trying their browser.

That press release is insane. Sharing "approximate location"?