If your business model involves subsidizing product prices with the prospect of tracking users and collecting personal data, consider releasing a version of your product that cost more, but does not engage in any data harvesting.
By now it should be obvious that no privacy oriented company (or in fact any other company) should treat user data as product.
I was referring to products such as Windows. The consumer versions of Windows do not have UI controls for stopping telemetry entirely, nor is there a paid extension offered by Microsoft that disables it.
There is clearly a demand for a Windows version that offers complete privacy, yet Microsoft is not interested in meeting that demand.
Exactly! It's a high time for everyone to have an open discussion and have some strict implementation around what kind of data collection is considered fair? Search being a complex application as discussed in our previous articles on our blog (https://0x65.dev/) requires data and by that I mean real "Quality" data. When dealing with large datasets, circumventing through all the noise is probably a harder problem than search itself. This is where Human Web shines for us.
Consider this realistic scenario, for a user query, we have to navigate through an index of billions of webpages and come up with at-least 10 relevant results (which fill up page one). On top of that, make sure that the result on first position (top result) is most Relevant or Vital (a very broad and subjective metric) - All of this under fraction of a second. Add to this, the complexity involved dealing with an ever evolving and exploding content on the web, where we have different languages and region locales to deal with.
Through our blog articles, we want to re-emphasize that building an "Independent" search engine is very very complex and a challenging task, specially when we incorporate constraints encountered at our scale and the fact that we want to really abide by the principles of "Privacy by Design".
As with most we too could assume that "X" data point is readily available, let's collect it! But In reality, we always circle back. Literally, ask ourselves ... Does collecting X datapoint violate privacy for our user? If the answer to this is ever a "Yes", the X datapoint is dropped immediately and we DO NOT COLLECT IT! For us, features which rely on that datapoint X are just not deemed worthy!!! If the industry starts to replicate this practice, it would be a great win for Cliqz.
It does come with challenges though.
1. It requires a change of mindset by the developers
2. Processing and mining data implies that code be deployed and run on the client-side.
3. The data collected might not be suitable to satisfy other use cases. Because data collected has been aggregated by users, it might not be reusable.
4. Aggregating past data might not be possible as the data to be aggregated may no longer be available on the client.
However, these drawbacks are a very small price to pay in return for the peace of mind of knowing that the data being collected cannot be transformed into sessions with uncontrollable privacy side-effects.
Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz (some of the comment comes from the article itself).
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REMOVED COMMENT:
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Is data collected by Cliqz Browser and your search engine used in any way to provide the MyOffrz marketing service? https://myoffrz.com/en/
Edit: according to the privacy policy the browser and the data collected through it is indeed used to deliver targeted ads.
https://cliqz.com/en/privacy-browser
This is the problem, we do not need any more ad companies that care about our privacy. We need browser vendors that are in the primary business of creating browsers, and possibly charging for advanced features.
We need search engines that do not collect our entire browsing history and how we interact with sites on the pretense that its needed to deliver better search results, while their business model actually revolves around using the same data to deliver targeted ads.
Cliqz could very well collect data and use it only to make search better, and release paid search products for businesses and customers, but they chose to make their users the products.
I had doubts about why people were so upset about your company, but now I see it. Cliqz is esentially capitalizing on the growing privacy movement to market itself, uses subpar technical solutions to ensure data privacy (routing sensitive data through FoxyProxy), and in the end delivers the same old service: our data is harvested, and we are delivered targeted ads.
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REPLY:
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You're cherry-picking and putting things out of context:
> "the data collected is used to deliver targeted ads"
That's not said like this anywhere [e.g. in the linked privacy policy], because it would be false. We do targeted ads, but the targeting is done on the >>client<<, which is the only place that has your history information. It's not possible to do targeting outside the browser itself, because, unlike the rest, we do not have this information.
> you collect browser history
Also incorrect. We collect URLs, but on isolation, we never have the full history. In the article we discussed at length why this is dangerous, of course, we would not do the same.
> Uses subpar technical solutions to ensure data privacy (routing sensitive data through FoxyProxy)
There is a nice short reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21696963, but just in case please have a look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07927.
> Cliqz could very well collect data and use it only to make search better, and release paid search products for businesses and customers, but they chose to make their users the products.
Everything we do is privacy preserving, the business model is no exception. We've been experimenting with paid products too (see: https://https://www.lumenbrowser.com/en/) - but it seems to me that if you had found that, you'd say "Yeah, but you want me to give credentials" - and suggest we live on donations instead. We need to be skeptical, and we thank you for that, but also be constructive and reasonable. Preventing anyone to improve the web, only helps companies that do not care about privacy.
> Cliqz is esentially capitalizing on the growing privacy movement to market itself.
We do not do it for marketing. We started building products with privacy in mind since 2014, back when privacy was even more niche than it is today. (from Day 2: Is data collection evil? [0]
We understand that people whenever the see data collection they assume it's for the worse, and whenever they see ads, double on that. In a way, we are victims of the wrong-doings of people that has come before us. But we are trying to build good products maintaining the privacy of the people. If you don't trust, you can verify, we are transparent on what we send and in how we do it. I you still don't like us, well we cannot please everybody, but please do not accuse us of doing things that we are actively fighting against, unlike many, we do not claim that the world is wrong, we are trying to change it.
[0] https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...