4 ms·

can you elaborate?

vrazj 8y ago
For some time last year, the Mozilla Corporation made it so a fraction of Firefox users got their entire browsing activity siphoned to a third party company, Cliqz, so they could bundle ads in the browser: 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...
weinzierl 8y ago
Cliqz is a company that primarily provides a Firefox based browser with privacy-oriented changes. Their slogan is „The no-compromise browser. Cliqz gives you relevant search results and does not leak your private data.” Sounds good on the surface, but what they really mean with „does not leak” is leak to Google. The Cliqz browser sends every keystroke in real-time to some supposedly Cliqz owned AWS instances. I verified that myself with Wireshark. They outright lie about this in their Transparency Cockpit: ”Telemetry data do not contain any information about queries, search results or visited URLs.” Now Cliqz is owned by Hubert Burda Media one of Germany‘s largest media groups. Honi soit quit mal y pense. I wrote a comment about this about a year ago[1] and also one about their relationship with Ghostery[2] more recently. Hubert Burda Media is also one of the primary drivers behind EU link tax and upload filter legislation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427992#15428104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427992#15428104 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159497#17161135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159497#17161135
- freehunter 8y ago
  >Honi soit quit mal y pense Is that considered well known enough to drop without a translation?
  - xenophonf 8y ago
    It's notable enough to make it into the English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense
Yoric 8y ago
Mozilla has been experimenting for years with ways to lead users to what they want to read without going through a search engine. This is both an attempt to improve user experience, an attempt to workaround Google's search quasi-monopoly and an attempt to find alternate revenue sources that would guarantee Mozilla's independence from Google. And yes, the difference between this and ads is paper-thin – just like the difference between search and ads is paper-thin – so it's easy to get things wrong. One of these experiments was through a German start-up called Cliqz, in which Mozilla invested in early stage. For a small fraction of German users, Firefox used the Cliqz engine as an implementation of this recommendation engine: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f... For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). Cliqz is open-source and there were contracts between Cliqz and Mozilla to legally guarantee user's privacy, but I do not know/remember the details. Also, I seem to remember that the default Cliqz settings in the experiment were set to minimal privacy, which wasn't very good. The experiment didn't last long, in part because of privacy concerns, but some people were (understandably) unhappy about this, including most Firefox devs. (I may be missing some details, I haven't followed this closely) More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...
- piotrkubisa 8y ago
  > For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). This. I don't get it why people point out on and on the same three mistakes that Firefox team made in the past. In case of Cliqz, I guess they want to say: "I am not going to use Firefox, because it sends browsing history to Cliqz". Isn't that a bit weird? I agree, that was a mistake and Firefox does not have crystal-clear history, but in case of Google Chrome I am not really sure how Google collect, enrich and manage my data. Personally, I can only notice two advantages of using Google Chrome over Firefox these days: a developer console and it is "faster" to develop websites targeting only one browser. I think I just got used to dev-console in Chrome, with each release the new developer console in Firefox is way better. About the second, it still doesn't matter much, because we have also mobile browsers, which also takes a lot of our precious time during development. Is there are any other unique selling point of Chrome which I've missed?

can you elaborate?

For some time last year, the Mozilla Corporation made it so a fraction of Firefox users got their entire browsing activity siphoned to a third party company, Cliqz, so they could bundle ads in the browser: 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...

weinzierl 8y ago

Cliqz is a company that primarily provides a Firefox based browser with privacy-oriented changes. Their slogan is „The no-compromise browser. Cliqz gives you relevant search results and does not leak your private data.” Sounds good on the surface, but what they really mean with „does not leak” is leak to Google. The Cliqz browser sends every keystroke in real-time to some supposedly Cliqz owned AWS instances. I verified that myself with Wireshark. They outright lie about this in their Transparency Cockpit: ”Telemetry data do not contain any information about queries, search results or visited URLs.” Now Cliqz is owned by Hubert Burda Media one of Germany‘s largest media groups. Honi soit quit mal y pense. I wrote a comment about this about a year ago[1] and also one about their relationship with Ghostery[2] more recently. Hubert Burda Media is also one of the primary drivers behind EU link tax and upload filter legislation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427992#15428104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427992#15428104 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159497#17161135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159497#17161135

freehunter 8y ago
>Honi soit quit mal y pense Is that considered well known enough to drop without a translation?
- xenophonf 8y ago
  It's notable enough to make it into the English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense

Yoric 8y ago

Mozilla has been experimenting for years with ways to lead users to what they want to read without going through a search engine. This is both an attempt to improve user experience, an attempt to workaround Google's search quasi-monopoly and an attempt to find alternate revenue sources that would guarantee Mozilla's independence from Google. And yes, the difference between this and ads is paper-thin – just like the difference between search and ads is paper-thin – so it's easy to get things wrong. One of these experiments was through a German start-up called Cliqz, in which Mozilla invested in early stage. For a small fraction of German users, Firefox used the Cliqz engine as an implementation of this recommendation engine: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f... For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). Cliqz is open-source and there were contracts between Cliqz and Mozilla to legally guarantee user's privacy, but I do not know/remember the details. Also, I seem to remember that the default Cliqz settings in the experiment were set to minimal privacy, which wasn't very good. The experiment didn't last long, in part because of privacy concerns, but some people were (understandably) unhappy about this, including most Firefox devs. (I may be missing some details, I haven't followed this closely) More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...

piotrkubisa 8y ago
> For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). This. I don't get it why people point out on and on the same three mistakes that Firefox team made in the past. In case of Cliqz, I guess they want to say: "I am not going to use Firefox, because it sends browsing history to Cliqz". Isn't that a bit weird? I agree, that was a mistake and Firefox does not have crystal-clear history, but in case of Google Chrome I am not really sure how Google collect, enrich and manage my data. Personally, I can only notice two advantages of using Google Chrome over Firefox these days: a developer console and it is "faster" to develop websites targeting only one browser. I think I just got used to dev-console in Chrome, with each release the new developer console in Firefox is way better. About the second, it still doesn't matter much, because we have also mobile browsers, which also takes a lot of our precious time during development. Is there are any other unique selling point of Chrome which I've missed?