Cliqz and Ghostery join forces to defend your privacy

We were always brothers in arms but now finally Ghostery joins Cliqz officially. We welcome the Ghostery team and the more than 10 million Ghostery users to the Cliqz family! We also give Ghosty, Ghostery’s lovable mascot, a special place in our hearts.

Cliqz stands for uncompromising user data privacy. We never collect personal data. We do not have a concept of user profile. We never sell user data. This of course will be true for the users of the Ghostery products. As consequence of the acquisition, the Ghostery products will fall under the jurisdiction of the German data privacy laws (which most people agree are the strictest in the world). German data privacy laws do not allow third-party tracking with identifier without informed consent from the user.

We will protect our users actively against trackers so that they can enjoy the web freely without having to worry about their privacy.

We have described many times what tracking does and how it works. See for example our study “Tracking the Trackers”. Tracking is often implemented for legitimate purposes (e.g. analytics or advertising) but is implemented carelessly without regard for users, publishers and often local data privacy laws. Our goal is to make sure that our users can enjoy the web without having to worry about how carefully the sites have been implemented.

In a time of exponentially increasing surveillance and indecent commercialization of data, we believe that technical solutions need to be available to protect the user against tracking practices that are invisible to them. With Ghostery we significantly improve the range of technologies we can deploy to inform and protect our users worldwide.

Soon we will combine our two approaches to bring anti-tracking to a completely new level. Ghostery’s strength lies in their knowledge about the trackers and their purposes. Cliqz’s strength is in the machine learning technologies to detect whether requests from your browser can be used for tracking. Together we protect the user better, make the internet faster and are better at avoiding side-effects of disabling tracking. We are convinced that together we will create a better and more sustainable internet experience for our users with no 3rd party tracking, increased speed, decreased data consumption and full compliance with the strictest data privacy laws in the world. We want to enable our users to move through the web without being identified by trackers – like ghosts.

The combined technology will improve website loading time by blocking common trackers and protect users from increasingly aggressive data gathering methods. Even before the release of integrated products, you already can have a glimpse on the joint power of Ghostery and Cliqz anti-tracking by activating Ghostery in the Cliqz desktop browser, or by using both the Cliqz and Ghostery extensions for Firefox in parallel. After installing the Ghostery add-on, you’ll need to specify which tracking elements should be blocked. Only then Ghostery’s tracking protection is active.