New Update Testing Cliqz in Firefox

[HarborFront]

About a year ago, Mozilla announced a strategic investment in Cliqz GmbH, the Munich, Germany-based provider of search and privacy tools. Today, we want to tell you about an important upcoming Firefox test in Germany that will use Cliqz technology.

Cliqz delivers recommendations and other information, such as news, weather, and sports, directly into the address bar as you type. In our Firefox Context Graph post last year, we highlighted the increasing problem of centralisation and how that impacts discovery on the Web. We want to provide recommendations from new and diverse places, make space for innovation in discovery and navigation, and above all build experiences our users love.

The Cliqz product has demonstrated great potential throughout Firefox testing this year. Users tell us their recommendations are fast, valuable, and save time by taking them directly to the intended destination.

Next week, we will be launching our most significant test so far. Less than one percent of users in Germany installing Firefox from our main download page will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box.

This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. 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. Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox. Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected. Cliqz’s code is available for public review and a description of these techniques can be found here.

One of Mozilla’s core privacy principles is No Surprises: we will use and share data in ways that are transparent and benefit our users. That is why we are telling you about this today. We want users to understand why we’ve taken this approach and what it means for them. While still a small experiment, the data collection and new search experience are major changes in the way this build of Firefox performs. We hope that users will appreciate the improved experience, but if users want to turn it off, they can always disable data collection or remove the Cliqz add-on entirely.

Testing Cliqz in Firefox

 

[HarborFront]

Cliqz add-on is similar to Privacy Badger which uses algorithm for screening websites unlike Ghostery which uses blocklists.

It would be great to combine the two just like combining Ghostery and Privacy Badger in using two different methods to filter websites.

There are some controversy in the use of Cliqz though

An index of discussions about the Cliqz controversy • r/firefox

 

[HarborFront]

You might want to remove traces of Cliqz in WaterFox as well

Cliqz need to be removed from Waterfox • r/waterfox

 

[Insecurity]

Search suggestions and more is nothing new, but it's kinda sad that this feature collects more data than it actually needs.
Everyone knows Mozilla wants an open and privacy friendly web, but this is not really privacy friendly for me:

• Search Queries and Webpage Data to Cliqz: This includes text as you type in the URL bar, queries you send to certain search engines, and data about the webpages you visit and interactions with those pages, such as mouse movements, scrolls, and time spent.
  
  
• Interaction Data to Cliqz: This includes your interactions with specific fields and buttons in the Cliqz feature. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to understand performance over time.
  
  
• Interaction Data to Mozilla: This includes counts of visits to search engine pages, which search engines you use, and your Cliqz identifier.
  
  
• Location Data to Cliqz: This includes your location whenever you open a new window or type in the URL bar. You may opt-out of location sharing in the Cliqz Settings menu in the URL bar.

Source: Firefox by default shares data to:

Sure, they need the informations about what you type to show you suggestions. They need your location to show you the current weather or similar stuff. But why the hell do they need to know my mouse movements, scrolls, the time spent on pages I visit and why the hell is all this gathered data linked to a unique identifier?

That's not what I expected from Mozilla, because they always found a way to implement useful features without unneccessary tracking. Yes, some "tracking" is okay as long as it's needed to provide the service. But this is a little bit too much for my taste and it's not something I expect from a search bar when I'm typing.

I hope they'll be transparent about this if you enable this feature. Seriously. At the end it's the users choice to use it, but I'd like to see a way to completely opt-out from the interaction tracking on the websites I visit.