Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?
Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.
We are aware of this and it's unfortunate, although the lists are not the main ones from community like Easylist, uBlock Origin etc. Cliqz does need to collect data to build it's search engine and other features. Even though we do with by privacy-by-design in mind and without collecting any PII (we will be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blogposts scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday),still we do end up getting on such lists.
Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing. Additionally, also happy to help setup network debugging incase you want check what exactly goes out. - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core
We are also willing to discuss with the maintainers of the list and explaining what and how data collection is done.