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Comment by solso | Hacker News Reader

[Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz]

Hi, I read the thread and thought the answer was good enough, but it seems that you are not yet convinced. Let me try:

1) Here there is a list of publications regarding privacy by Cliqz (including published scientific papers). It should have fairly easy to find it using a search engine :-) https://0x65.dev/pages/dissemination-cliqz.html Hopefully, the paper will convince you that Cliqz privacy commitment is serious.

2) Feel free to monitor your own traffic to see whether or not we are tracking you.

3) Honestly, if someone tells you that anolysis means anonymous + analysis, why do you not believe it? It does not take long to find references of the name on the source code. On a separate note, as a company (Cliqz) that offers anti-tracking and ad-blocking, I can tell you that blocklists are a bit more sophisticated than that.

Hope that this will address your concerns,

[comment edited: why do you not believe it?]

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A quick skimming of those PDFs found no mentions of "anolysis." Your colleague claimed that papers were going to be released "soon" on it. It's been at least two years since you started using it, so why hasn't there been yet?

It does not take long to find references of the name on the source code.

No references in any of your published source code, and your search engine isn't free software:

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acliqz-oss+anolysis

Honestly, if someone tells you that anolysis means anonymous + analysis, why do you not believe it?

Cliqz has done unsavory things in the past (like the Firefox fiasco a few years back, for example, which I can't fault Cliqz entirely for: Mozilla is just as guilty).

On a separate note, as a company (Cliqz) that offers anti-tracking and ad-blocking, I can tell you that blocklists are a bit more sophisticated than that.

"anolysis" gets around both uBlock Origin and uMatrix, despite both of them automatically blacklisting any URL with "analytics" in it, as an example. Getting around the most popular content filterers on the internet is a pretty strong signal.

> No references in any of your published source code, and your search engine isn't free software:

You looked at the wrong tab, check in "Code" to find "code" related to Anolysis: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acliqz-oss+anolysis&type=Co...

> Cliqz has done unsavory things in the past (like the Firefox fiasco a few years back, for example, which I can't fault Cliqz entirely for: Mozilla is just as guilty).

Not sure how this is Cliqz' fuck-up. We are not hiding anything. On the contrary we are very transparent and detailed about how everything we do is designed to not track users. All of this is on our new tech blog: https://0x65.dev, feel free to have a look between two comments on HN and give us some feedback!

> "anolysis" gets around both uBlock Origin and uMatrix, despite both of them automatically blacklisting any URL with "analytics" in it, as an example. Getting around the most popular content filterers on the internet is a pretty strong signal.

It's not called "getting around it" when there is no tracking or ads going on (if you want to see how smart the "most popular content filterers are" check out this link and see that the image is blocked because it contains the substring: "analytics": https://whotracks.me/blog/private_analytics.html. Wicked smart!).

Anolysis is not a typo, it's a project name, people tend to do that when they care and spend a lot of time on projects: give them names. So, at the risk of repeating myself, Anolysis = Analysis + Anonymous (at the time we thought it was a pretty neat name!).

Anolysis does not operate outside of Cliqz products (no websites analytics here and we do not rely on a third-party, we built it in-house for this reason) and we put a lot of work into it to make sure it does not use a unique ID (like virtually every other analytics out there) but allows to by-design not track any single user (in fact the system does not even have the concept of a user). Sure, we did not write extensively about it but I guess we have to start somewhere (in December we are writing on 24 different things we do, we will be sure to consider Anolysis as a good candidate for a technical blog post in the future).

What you attribute to malice is simply a lack of time, as you probably noticed Cliqz is working on solving a lot of very hard problems (search, browsers, antitracking, adblocking, privacy-preserving telemetry and so much more) and writing a paper about the new system you designed and implemented is not always the priority :)

I'm one of those people who remains skeptic about the anonymity of the tracking Cliqz does in general. Obviously people have a hard time believing any company that is in the advertising space and preaches about privacy, mainly because they have been burned several times before.

For me it was the data proxying through FoxyProxy that made me uncomfortable. I have also remained unconvinced about the motivation for not using Tor: because it is hard to integrate into extensions. Cliqz also has its own browser, not just an extension, where they could opt to use Tor, but they route through FoxyProxy.

You must find a way to make it technically impossible to identify users, a legal or business structure is not enough. It wouldn't be unheard of to secretly own the proxy company and relink user data.

Well, we released our beta search for Tor yesterday: search4tor7txuze.onion/ (works obviously only in the Tor browser). That’s as good as it gets regarding making it technically impossible, isn’t it? More complex obviously for a browser - but the answer can simply not be „only no data at all is good“, because that’s a destructive approach that only favors the worst privacy intruders; no one would then be able to build up competition. We work hard to be as transparent as possible about what we do. Show me any other company that builds a big data product (like search) that is so transparent about „yes we collect data, but it’s non personal - here is how we do it, please scrutinize us“. Are we perfect? Hell no! But we try and we go a long way to be challenged to improve. If we were shady - would we be naked in front of you, showing each step we take? We would not even interact with the tech folks (especially not on hacker news, where people really know what they talk about), but scam people who know less (at least that sounds like a more reasonable strategy to me if I would want to fool people - which we don’t).

(EDIT/Disclaimer: I obviously work for Cliqz)

We appreciate your openness about how you collect data, but that's still not enough because literally every other advertising company is deceptive when they talk about privacy.

The openness must be paired with privacy that is guaranteed under all circumstances, and the most common way to achieve that would be to route the anonymized data through Tor.

Your search engine being also available on Tor has nothing to do with data collection by Cliqz on other sites. Your search engine website is not the avenue through which the Cliqz browser and extension collects data as you browse the web, I'm confused why would you even bring it up.

Hi dessant,

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.

Would be really interesting to know your concerns with FoxyProxy.FoxyProxy is legally bound to not log the IP or share it.

From the HPN protocol's perspective, data can be routed via any trusted party - in our case it's FoxyProxy.

Right now, there is no way to configure this in the Browser, but should be doable. It's actually one of the motivations to move to the newer version of HPN[1].

We do agree that sending data through Tor network is the gold standard for anonymity.

- We did a lot of work on getting Tor running in Cliqz browsers. It's a hard problem but definitely do-able, something we might pursue again in future[2]. - We also have experimented with WebAssembly version of Tor client to make it compatible for web extension[3].

Having the ability to use the Tor network in Cliqz products is also good, because we can actually leverage the anonymity guarantees by sending data via .onion services. You can also check more details under evaluation section of the paper[4].

In case you wish to check the network traffic you can also check the debugging section[5].

References:

1. https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network... 2. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/commit/12fcef8479d9c3... 3. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/commit/12fcef8479d9c3... 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.07927.pdf 5. https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-da...

You say you're copying Google and you use that to promote your product, it's very hard to believe you are privacy friendly.

You're also owned by a media company, that makes it even harder to believe that you're going to respect users privacy.

Add to that the tone of arrogance of articles such as "the world needs Cliqz", you can see why it's a no-no.

Every few days there is a post on HN trying so hard to convince the readers that Cliqz is the best, even though the articles read between the lines, that the Cliqz team does not have the capability to make its own search algo or make slightly more complicated queries.

I am experienced enough to know where this is coming from: managers that do not know what they are doing and engineers drunk from glory that do not see their own mistakes.

Please Cliqz hire a search engine expert. Hire great engineers, they are going to cost twice, but you're going to get a search engine that actually works.

Please, or the HN community will have to bash you every time you post an article.

What’s your business model? Cliqz seems to employ more than 120 people and I can’t find any mention of how you’ll make money.

However they do it, they clearly don't money tracking people at this stage given no one knows or uses Cliqz.

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