[solso]

Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-)

"The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where their mouth was. Kudos for that.

Privacy was never Cliqz primary product. Privacy was a strict design requirement of Cliqz, which can be marketed more or less. Data collection and browsers alike, we wanted them to be private, because that's the right thing to do, even if it was more difficult to implement. The whole data vs. privacy argument is fallacious. One of the reasons why privacy was so important to us is precisely now, whoever ends up owning the data cannot learn anything about any of the users. Imagine the government getting Google's data if they go belly up or upon "legal" request (change Google by any other company). The data of Cliqz poses no risk to any user, including myself.

The primary product of Cliqz was search, either as the typical result page or instant search integrated on the browser. That's very difficult to build, and expensive, something that DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, etc. do not have to pay because they rely on the backend of others (not 100%, but mostly). If we were repackaging Bing/Google/Yandex with a different ranking twists, our quality would have been better from the beginning, of course. But that's not building an alternative to Google, which is what we wanted. Still, that's not a pun to DDG and others, what they provide has value to the users, of course. But they are not real alternative, kind of an electric car that gets its electricity from burning coal.

Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. For Brave it's Chrome, for Cliqz was both Chrome and Search. Too much to chew? Yes, but we had plenty of fun. The only thing I regret after +6 years working there is the loss of such a great team.

[jszymborski]

Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be?

I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).

[solso]

Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them.

Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off.

In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).

[yellowapple]

> Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google.

Using Google's browser as the basis for one's own browser is certainly an interesting way to "fight" against Google.

Much like how collecting ad performance / analytics data from users is an interesting way to achieve privacy as a "strict design requirement".

[solso]

Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with the [meta]searchers. But the code is open, and can be forked at will (there are some caveats to that claim, licences, internal APIs, etc.)

You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy, it's how you do it that matters, becomes a design requirement. Collecting a url visited, can lead to build a user history (privacy hazard) or not. It's an design choice. The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage (for anyone curios we did publish plenty of material on the topic, https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...)

[yellowapple]

> Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right

Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium.

> The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage

No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected.

That is:

> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy

This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.

[solso]

>> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy

> This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected.

That's not definitionally false, if it sounds false to you is because you have an implicit assumption that does not apply.

Data from users does not imply user sessions on the collector side (session as a set of multiple data points belonging to the same user).

If sessions are collected, then, privacy is impossible to guarantee. We are well aware of that, having worked on this problems for almost 20 years. But that's precisely what Cliqz never did. All messages from our users are record-unlinkable for us, meaning that we have no way to reconstruct any session.

If you are interested, check the HumanWeb posts on https://0x65.dev/ or the papers https://0x65.dev/pages/dissemination-cliqz.html

[yellowapple]

> That's not definitionally false, if it sounds false to you is because you have an implicit assumption that does not apply.

That "implicit assumption" is awareness of what "privacy" and "data collection" mean, and it very much applies (arguing otherwise is revisionist). Ergo: "definitionally false".

In particular:

> Data from users does not imply user sessions on the collector side

Yes it does, because otherwise collecting that data is pointless. Further:

> All messages from our users are record-unlinkable for us, meaning that we have no way to reconstruct any session.

Not if a malicious actor (which may or may not include a future or even current version of you) taps into the locally-stored tracking data. The very existence of that data and its collection thereof is a fundamental security and privacy risk. Just because you ain't currently siphoning it to remote servers doesn't mean malware can't do so, or that a "critical security update" can't reprogram the Cliqz browser/addon to do so.

That is: whether the aggregation happens client-side or server-side does not change the basic fact that the aggregation is happening, and that aggregated data remains a juicy target (and to make matters worse, even if you did want to safeguard that data, it's effectively outside your control). That very aggregation itself is therefore a violation of my privacy.

And this is all taking Cliqz' claims at face value. We could certainly dig further into how we're supposed to take your word that you are indeed discarding unique identifiers (including IP addresses). We could (and should) certainly do the same for other sites claiming to discard such identifiers, but given DuckDuckGo (for example) ain't in the business of peddling sleazy-looking adware¹ (to my knowledge at least), I'm at least slightly more inclined to take their word for it.

I'll give Cliqz credit for at least trying to address these issues in the hopes of finding a creative solution that gives advertisers what they want without egregious privacy violations, but - having read the papers before, and reading them again - I'm still pretty thoroughly unconvinced. I'd much rather not have tracking at all, like how newspaper and magazine ads work (barring some substantial leap in technology, newspapers and magazines never tracked my "engagement" with the ads within or how long my eyeballs were looking at them or how quickly I turned the page or what have you).

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¹: https://cliqz.com/en/cliqz-angebote