koantig

Testing Cliqz in Firefox
▻https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox

Incredibly ham-fisted move by Mozilla. It’s bad enough to enrol people without their explicit consent, on top of that it’s about gathering browsing data!

Cliqz delivers recommendations and other information, such as news, weather, and sports, directly into the address bar as you type.
(...)
Less than one percent of users in Germany installing Firefox from our main download page will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box.
(...)
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.

Ah but wait:

if users want to turn it off, they can always disable data collection or remove the Cliqz add-on entirely.

Jeez, thanks, that’s awfully kind of you!

To be fair, the approach taken by cliqz seems technically interesting as they’re building a client-side (as opposed to server-side) aggregation system, which is reminiscent of current solutions for taking back control of personal data, like self-hosting:
▻https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885e5

...
SERP=cliqz.com/q=firefox hq address, UID=X, TIMESTAMP=2016...
SERP=google.com/q=firefox hq address, UID=X, TIMESTAMP=2016...
SERP=google.com/q=facebook cristina grillo, UID=X, TIMESTAMP=2016...
SERP=google.com/q=trump for president, UID=Y, TIMESTAMP=2016...
...

But Mozilla, who invested in Cliqz last year, might have shot themselves in the foot with this German experiment.

#mozilla #firefox #cliqz #privacy