Private search browser Cliqz buys Ghostery ad-tracker tool | Hacker News Reader

Private search browser Cliqz buys Ghostery ad-tracker tool

techcrunch.com

67 pointsbjoern_cliqz11 comments

I moved over to Privacy Badger a while ago. It's an EFF project unlikely to ever be bought by a for profit company.

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

It seems that both Ghostery and Privacy Badger are asking for the "Read and change all your data on the websites that you visit" permission. But Privacy Badger also asks for the "Change your privacy-related settings" permission.

I kinda trust the EFF but I'm not sure what the implications of that are.

I like Privacy Badger and trust the EFF, unfortunately it's not available on Safari and Ghostery is the next-best choice.

Probably anyone who's interested will know, but I think that it's worth noting that Ghostery (https://www.ghostery.com) is not tracking software; it is anti-tracking software, meant to track ads' tracking behaviour. (Thus this purchase is, presumably, a good thing.) I think that calling it an "ad-tracker tool" risks misleading the casual reader.

Yes. As someone who was not familiar with Ghostery ad-tracker tool I thought I was about to read an article about how a private search is not really a private search.

Edit: Private search browser Cliqz buys Ghostery’s anti-tracking tools.

The thing always got mentioned whenever Ghostery is brought up is that they were owned by an advertising company that sold user data. I wonder how Cliqz plans to make this a profitable venture (besides being another Mozilla charity case)?

> I wonder how Cliqz plans to make this a profitable venture (besides being another Mozilla charity case)?

Whether or not it's a convincing case, the article does address that:

> Cliqz has previously discussed its plans to monetize this pro-privacy approach and usage of its free, anti-tracking browser and search products via a companion Cliqz Offers app — that will be designed to broadcast all offers to all users so Cliqz does not need to track individuals’ browsing habits to power ad targeting. Rather tracking of browsing habits occurs locally, on a user’s device, allowing for the tech to display pertinent offers to users without Cliqz itself needing to be party to its users’ browsing behavior.

Rather than anti-tracking software, I believe even by your definition (meant to track ads' tracking behaviour) it would be considered tracker-tracking software.

I believe part of what they do is verify advertisers are getting their money's worth on their ads.

> Rather than anti-tracking software, I believe even by your definition (meant to track ads' tracking behaviour) it would be considered tracker-tracking software.

Fair enough; I didn't mean to claim that the headline was objectively wrong, just that it risked being misleading. I am fine with software tracking lots of stuff online, as long as it doesn't expose my private data to someone else. (Whether Ghostery meets my personal bar I can't say; I found its UI on Firefox unpleasant, and switched to Privacy Badger.)

There are official posts on the blogs of Cliqz and Ghostery as well: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-acquire... https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/cliqz-und-ghostery

You can check the code of Cliqz's products by yourself. It's all on Github: https://github.com/cliqz-oss

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