Woodrow- I'm very glad you brought this up. In the early years many of the Chinese software companies desperately tried to claw themselves up to the top and no doubt used questionable tactics along the way. But those days are gone and companies like Qihoo and Baidu are multi-billion dollar conglomerates now. This is really an important point because they are fully aware that any dodgy practices (I'm talking unlawful and not some oversight) could destroy them.
Too often someone will bring up Privacy Policy, as if anything contained within will disclose secret monitoring by China. This is always quite disheartening for me to read as a fairly standard PP is used by just about every company on this Planet (Mars is different) and certainly wouldn't contain anything that Qihoo's competitors can point to and warn people about.
Also frequently mentioned is how Qihoo can make money while giving a product away for free- this one is easy to answer. The security products for both the Desktop and Mobile are their Loss Leaders. They hope (and are proved correct) that by giving a good product away they can draw their users (over 1 billion currently) to use their web browser, and/or their Search Engine, and/or their App Store:
1). The Qihoo Web Browser will earn money just like Mozilla and Google do with Firefox and Chrome.
2). The Search engine makes money just like google does with theirs.
3). Their app Store makes money just like Apple does with theirs.
Advertising Revenue is where it is at in all the above, and there is nothing sinister about it (except Sinophobes and Flat Earthers may feel different). Personally I am very sure that by the installation of Qihoo TS they will not loot my system for information that they don't expect to be provided (Email, name, etc), and I am also certain that they could care less about where a lonely girl from NYC web surfs to.
But I'm sure there are other theories...
