Mozilla Cliqz experiment in GER, 1% of installs, collects surf data amd URLs

Posted this yesterday in another thread about CLIQZ that did not get much attention:

I looked into the CLIQZ browser (standalone, not the Firefox feature/extension) about a half a year ago because someone at my company suggested to use it as our standard browser. CLIQZ is heavily marketed as privacy respecting browser. Just the quotes from their homepage[1]: "Cliqz gives you relevant search results and does not leak your private data.", "Does not save any private data, has all the privacy features."

Knowing the company behind CLIQZ is one of the largest German media groups (Hubert Burda Media) I was suspicious. A quick check with Wireshark revealed that every keystroke in the URL-bar is sent in realtime to some Amazon servers.

Given that CLIQZ does come with ad blocking and anti tracking features I assume that when they talk about privacy they really mean private between Hubert Burda Media and you, cutting out Google, Facebook, etc.

EDIT: Here is another quote from their website[2]:

> "Privacy by Design" means that no personal data is stored on our servers. We do not only promise that. Using the Cliqz transparency dashboard you are able to check that anytime."

The mentioned Transparency Cockpit explicitly says: "Telemetry data do not contain any information about queries, search results or visited URLs."

[1] https://cliqz.com

[2] https://cliqz.com/en/desktop

Facebook does this everyday to 100% of its visitors. You can login right now to FB ads and buy insanely targeted ads based on their er' 100% legal click-data. ha