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> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration.

by Sylos 9y ago

> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration. Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz, so they have insight into the business process, and they have a contract with Cliqz/Burda that says that no personal data is allowed to be stored. So, even if Burda decided to violate the contract/law, Mozilla would notice that and could pull out by simply shutting the sending of data off in Firefox. Mozilla also has made an official statement that no personal data will be collected, so if they did anyways, it would be misleading of consumers, so Mozilla themselves would then violate the law. Meaning that, unless you have no faith at all into the legal system, I don't think there's a reason to be concerned. It's just controversial, because you can easily spin a wholly different story by leaving out some facts, which is of course extremely convenient for Google/Microsoft/Apple, anyone who's for whatever reason salty about Mozilla, and last but definitely not least, clickbait journalists.

pseudalopex 9y ago
It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
- Sylos 9y ago
  > It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. You presuppose that it's reasonable, but is it? If you can prove that you're doing everything right to protect the user, should you not be allowed to collect the data? If we just call every non-opt-in data collection unethical, no matter if it can actually negatively affect users or not, then you're levelling the playing field in favor of those that actually collect and use data unethically. Because you're essentially saying that it's all the same, unless you're not collecting data at all. And for some services, you simply do need to collect data, and sometimes you even do need it to be non-opt-in, because otherwise your data sample will have a severe bias. > Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. If you just so happen to read one sentence further than that, it says "Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.". That says exactly that no personal data is collected. And yes, a list of visited domains can be used to identify a person, but it's not necessary to store the visited domains aggregated by each individual user for this. They'll just intermix the domain lists from all users.

by Sylos 9y ago

pseudalopex 9y ago

It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Sylos 9y ago
> It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. You presuppose that it's reasonable, but is it? If you can prove that you're doing everything right to protect the user, should you not be allowed to collect the data? If we just call every non-opt-in data collection unethical, no matter if it can actually negatively affect users or not, then you're levelling the playing field in favor of those that actually collect and use data unethically. Because you're essentially saying that it's all the same, unless you're not collecting data at all. And for some services, you simply do need to collect data, and sometimes you even do need it to be non-opt-in, because otherwise your data sample will have a severe bias. > Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. If you just so happen to read one sentence further than that, it says "Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.". That says exactly that no personal data is collected. And yes, a list of visited domains can be used to identify a person, but it's not necessary to store the visited domains aggregated by each individual user for this. They'll just intermix the domain lists from all users.