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by solso
2241 days ago
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There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data collection is and always was safe wrt to privacy. Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work. The press release that FF -- written by one of these people with a lot of biases and published without review -- did not help as it was misleading. We did a big mistake back then. Instead of rebutting it, we chose to ignore the FUD assuming that facts would prevail. They did not. Sadly the community is "scared", we have been congratulated and lauded by anyone who checked our systems. But never endorsed in public, there is little to gain and a lot to lose (you are getting a sneak preview right now). Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now. |
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If my eyes rolled any harder I'd likely pull a muscle.
Let's dissect this a bit:
> Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period.
It ain't about it being sent (though that's bad, too). It's about it being collected at all. Cliqz collects and aggregates my data somewhere, and that is therefore a violation of my privacy, even if (for now) it's on my local machine (I could certainly routinely delete that collected data, much like I do with cache and cookies, but then what's the point of using Cliqz in the first place?).
> Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.)
I have checked the claims for myself (to the best of my ability). None of them address the very real concern of the aggregated data being, you know, aggregated. Just because it's on my local machine doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stay that way; every second it's on my machine is a liability that anyone who's privacy-conscious would want to eliminate (and anyone who's not privacy-conscious doesn't care about).
Like, there's no argument that Cliqz's HumanWeb is at least less evil than traditional tracking systems, but it still relies on aggregation of data, and that is still a massive privacy hazard. Not to mention that the data that is sent¹ is still rich with datapoints that could be used for fingerprinting (the papers seem to suggest there are "heuristics" to detect and anonymize this, but said papers are pretty light on detail, and source code is meaningless since we don't know if it's what's actually running server-side). And also not to mention the rather sketchy distribution methods, like piggybacking on .NET downloads via chip.de in a manner that's been a hallmark of spyware since Y2K.
> they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work.
"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."
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> Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.
Not with that attitude. The search engine technology y'all developed is pretty interesting from a technical standpoint, and could be put to use (I'm sure DDG would be interested in adding it to their mix, or perhaps Ecosia could use it to diversify their Bing/Yahoo results the way DDG does with their in-house crawler). Same with Ghostery's more efficient network request blocking engine² (though it seems like Ghostery's development is still ongoing, no?), which could be useful in other ad and tracker blockers. Neither of these are much in the way of money-makers (well, maybe the search one is, if y'all license it), but it'll at least help make the best of a lousy situation.
I get that it sucks - I've similarly felt the pain of a product into which I've put my blood, sweat, and tears ultimately failing. It's easy to write off the detractors and critics as simply uninformed masses who just "didn't understand how great of a product we have". It's harder to admit that the product wasn't great, or the name was terrible, or the market wasn't as big as anticipated, or what have you.
I'm confident that being the bright and enthusiastic people y'all are, you'll find your footing again. Just, um, try to come up a name that doesn't scream "adware" like "Cliqz MyOffrz" next time, lol. And maybe instead of writing off your criticisms as "FUD", actually examine why those criticisms persist and what you can do to better address them.
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¹: https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/transparency
²: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html