Ghostery is Acquired by Cliqz | Hacker News Reader

Ghostery is Acquired by Cliqz

ghostery.com

111 pointsAoyagi13 comments

I'm writing this using the Cliqz browser and I have to say I have been a very happy user for a couple of weeks now. I like the search bar (I don't search in German that often but still get quite relevant "instant" results in my experience), the integrated tracking protection and just the overall look-and-feel.

Personally, I also find it important that Cliqz is based on Firefox, other than almost all the other new browser projects out there which are based on Chromium. There is nothing wrong with Chromium, but I believe some choice / friendly competition in rendering and JavaScript engines is important for the overall well-being of the web.

Cliqz is run by a great team, the founder Jean-Paul Schmetz is an amazing software engineer with a lot of experience (has been CTO of Burda Digital since the mid-90ies and later went to Stanford to study CS) and they have very high standards for software engineering and computer science.

Well... when it comes to data privacy, I'd say better the Germans than the Donald.

The Donald has easier access to data abroad than data in the US :)

There is an official post on the blog of Cliqz as well: https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/cliqz-und-ghostery

"The Cliqz anti-tracking technology is a truly revolutionary solution that uses algorithmic blocking that doesn’t require a blocklist..."

That sounds an awful lot like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy Badger.

So, is this a good thing? Should I worry? While Mozilla is presented as a shareholder of Cliqz. It appears to be a minority shareholder and the majority shareholder seems to be a media company, for a Ad/Privacy blocker... I'm not sure how to feel about it.

I think this is a great thing. I have been reading about Cliqz and what they published [0], [1] and I believe they are quite serious about privacy, as a matter of personal opinion, so serious I find it hard to draw a parallel between them and any other player in the industry. If no personal identifiable information is collected to start with, and as they call it, "privacy by design" is guaranteed, then it really matters very little who is a shareholder.

[0] http://www2016.net/proceedings/proceedings/p121.pdf [1] http://josepmpujol.net/public/papers/big_green_tracker.pdf

I thought Ghostery was untrustworthy since they phone home and share data with ad agencies even if you opt out of that option?

Did they change that?

Taking user privacy to next level

German Burda media is behind Cliqz. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Burda-Tochter-Cliqz-...

Edit:

Major shareholder: Burda media (Focus, Bunte, etc)

Minor shareholder: Mozilla

Mozilla is behind cliqz too: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

Both these comments are literally in the first sentence of the OP:

"We are overjoyed to announce that the Ghostery extension and mobile browsers have been acquired by Cliqz, a German company owned by Mozilla and Hubert Burda Media that builds ground-breaking browser technologies to make the internet more private and easier to use."

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