Damned if you disclose your responsible stewardship of user data, damned if you don't.
> 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.
> Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.
> One of Mozilla’s core privacy principles is No Surprises: we will use and share data in ways that are transparent and benefit our users. That is why we are telling you about this today. We
> We hope that users will appreciate the improved experience, but if users want to turn it off, they can always disable data collection or remove the Cliqz add-on entirely.
Cliqz has an interesting privacy stance, and a decent privacy policy. I don’t know if they are trustworthy or not, but I think the bad press against them has been unfair.
Excerpt:
To gain your trust we have open-sourced all of our front-end code (and hence everything that sends something from your computer). We know very few people will ever look into the code, but: you or everyone else could every time check that we’re honest. And hence we cannot hide anything.
Excerpt:
History and bookmarks are always processed only locally and never sent to us
With Chrome I do not expect privacy. With FF every time I trust them the fk me over.
So - with Chrome I know what I am getting and I treat it as such. With FF I only wanted a Browser. I never aigned up for their (internal and external) advertising, Pocket stuff and other st like this.
So no - because FF brands itself as a privacy option, I hold them to a different and much higher standard - and the fail every time.
> "PSA: Huber Burda Media, the majority owner of Cliqz, which owns many media and digital brands, owns the computer magazine "Chip", its online platform offers "secure installers" which are used to distribute malware (adware)."
and
> "One interesting thing I've found on the Cliqz about page, is that they call themselves a "small startup". This is a lie since they're a sub division of Burda Media which is one of the biggest media companies in Europe. How can you trust a company if they even lie on their about page?"
> "I skimmed the source code of the Cliqz extension back during the scandal and as far as I could tell it sent back enough information for it to be possible to identify and create profiles for quite many of the users. Now it is perfectly possible that Cliqz were honest and handled the sensitive data carefully (e.g. by throwing away IPs), but we have no way of knowing that."
Even if Cliqz do "throw away IPs" that's not enough for it to no longer be personally identifying. It says nothing about Cliqz throwing away the data. How long before Cliqz realizes they're sitting on a trove of "valuable" data and changes their policy so they do retrospectively build profiles of users, or sell out to Facebook?
That's not responsible stewardship of data, and disclosing it on a blog page nobody read, just saying "it might happen to you, quietly and opt-out" is not responsible disclosure.
> 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.
> Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.
> One of Mozilla’s core privacy principles is No Surprises: we will use and share data in ways that are transparent and benefit our users. That is why we are telling you about this today. We
> We hope that users will appreciate the improved experience, but if users want to turn it off, they can always disable data collection or remove the Cliqz add-on entirely.