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Comment by MikusR | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla was sending your browser history to Cliqz in Germany. https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

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Mozilla never did such a thing. The browsing history was never sent in any shape or form. As the journalistic article you quote states, Mozilla put in place the HumanWeb[1,2,3], which was a privacy preserving data collection which ensured record-unlinkability, hence no session or history. Anonymity was guaranteed and the framework was extensively tested by privacy researchers from both Cliqz and Mozilla. Disclaimer: I worked at Cliqz.

[1]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm... [2]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-i... [3]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network-hpn...

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

> Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.

The chosen excerpt omits the fact that it is predicated on the HumanWeb. In the technical papers above there is a more precise description on what and how was collected. There was no user tracking, session or history being sent as all data points are anonymous and record-unlinkable by the receiver. The vague language, required for a general audience journal, certainly does not help.

Yup. As far as I'm concerned cliqz (and mozilla) completely lost my trust with that spyware.

Modified installers, randomly served to customers with no notification, opt-out by default, and sending full browser history to random servers is just too much for me to ever trust them that they have my privacy interests as their goal.

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