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Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to

by solso 6y ago

Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did. Cliqz search was never on par with Google -- I build parts of it -- but was getting there little by little. To be more precise, it was getting good enough, to not be a factor. That has some merit given the totally independent index (not relying on Bing under the hood). Brave the same as Cliqz are trying their best to offer an alternative. If you think you can do better, please do so. Believe, I'll root for you regardless of my opinion about you (we crossed path in the past). Why would I support you, even though that does not mean I use what you build? Because we are in need of having plurality on the Web, the more the better. Unlike you, I do not see the point of speaking bullshit, not sure if out of ignorance or ill-will, don't know, don't care.

chris_f 6y ago
In your experience, what was the biggest challenge to be on par with Google? From using Cliqz, I felt that the relevance of search results was fairly good. The challenge I had in many cases was that the coverage was so much less for non-common search terms that the information I was looking for just wasn't there. The Instant Answers on Google are also getting good to the point where sometimes I don't have to leave the SERP.
dessant 6y ago
Your employer being dishonest does not necessarily qualify you, so I'm not sure why it is being taken personally. There are also several incredibly talented people at Google who do awesome things, some even fight for human rights and privacy, but that does not absolve the atrocities Google as a company commits against the human race. Nor does your team's work on search engines absolve Cliqz of attempting to build a company that is based on pervasive user tracking, anonymized (deanonymizable in the future) or otherwise. I'd rather not address the rest of your personal attacks.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Yep, real "client-side", eh? Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.
- solso 6y ago
  This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue. UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit. There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not. This is accurate. They partnered with us at FoxyProxy to prevent browser telemetry from revealing users' IP addresses and other metadata. These guys are above board and even if there may have been a problem in 2017 with Firefox, that was no longer the case in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They bent over backwards and jumped through many hoops to hide their users' identity. They were very interested in the solving the engineering problem around anonymization. I know this from first-hand experience. This is a loss larger than many people realize. There are so few companies with such integrity and who put their users first, above profits or shareholders.

by solso 6y ago

chris_f 6y ago

In your experience, what was the biggest challenge to be on par with Google? From using Cliqz, I felt that the relevance of search results was fairly good. The challenge I had in many cases was that the coverage was so much less for non-common search terms that the information I was looking for just wasn't there. The Instant Answers on Google are also getting good to the point where sometimes I don't have to leave the SERP.

dessant 6y ago

Your employer being dishonest does not necessarily qualify you, so I'm not sure why it is being taken personally. There are also several incredibly talented people at Google who do awesome things, some even fight for human rights and privacy, but that does not absolve the atrocities Google as a company commits against the human race. Nor does your team's work on search engines absolve Cliqz of attempting to build a company that is based on pervasive user tracking, anonymized (deanonymizable in the future) or otherwise. I'd rather not address the rest of your personal attacks.

yellowapple 6y ago

> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Yep, real "client-side", eh? Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.

solso 6y ago
This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance." Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue. UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit. There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not. This is accurate. They partnered with us at FoxyProxy to prevent browser telemetry from revealing users' IP addresses and other metadata. These guys are above board and even if there may have been a problem in 2017 with Firefox, that was no longer the case in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They bent over backwards and jumped through many hoops to hide their users' identity. They were very interested in the solving the engineering problem around anonymization. I know this from first-hand experience. This is a loss larger than many people realize. There are so few companies with such integrity and who put their users first, above profits or shareholders.