On this page we answer the most frequently asked questions about the integration of Cliqz in Firefox.
Cliqz is a new type of search engine that focuses on data protection. Firefox with Cliqz displays search recommendations and other information such as news, weather news or news from the world of sports in the address bar while typing.
The recommendations you receive are quick and useful. They save you time by taking you directly to where you want to go – without detouring through a search results page.
Cliqz is available as a Firefox extension, which you can download from the Add-ons Store. In addition, a test is currently running in Germany under which one percent of users downloading Firefox from the official website receive a Firefox version with Cliqz.
No! No information that could personally identify you is collected. Every piece of private data remains on your device. This means that private data is not stored on our servers or shared with anyone (since we simply don’t have it). By the way, other search engines cannot claim that.
Learn more about Cliqz data privacy at our privacy policy.
Firefox with Cliqz automatically connects to Cliqz to display search results in the address bar. To provide you with results from the Cliqz backend, it is technically inevitable that your IP address is received and used in the exchange of messages between your device and the Cliqz search engine’s servers. This IP address is only and exclusively used to provide results for a given query. It is discarded immediately thereafter. Cliqz does not store IP addresses of users on its servers.
Users contribute anonymously to the statistical data that Cliqz uses to detect websites, assess their relevance and safety and improve the ranking of search results. Cliqz’ Human Web technology ensures by means of anonymization, encryption and proxy technologies that this statistical data is completely anonymous and free of any personally identifiable information.
Cliqz only collects statistical data that does not contain any personal information. All sensitive data remains in your browser, and never leaves your device. It is also very important to realize that each piece of data is sent individually, and we have no way to know from which user it comes from. In practice, only a very small, safe subset of the following activity is collected: public pages visited, results from additional search engines, rough estimations about engagement with visited pages (e.g. amount of scrolling done on a given page; just enough for us to assess the quality of the content). Since each of the data is sent individually and contains no personally identifiable information, it is technically impossible for Cliqz or Mozilla to draw any conclusion about a particular user.
Cliqz uses the Human Web to collect anonymous statistical data only to build up its search index and to assess the relevance and security of websites. The Human Web statistics contain no data that could be used to identify individual users or devices.
Learn more about Human Web. A detailed description of Human Web’s software code can be found on GitHub.
In order to protect your data, we use the following technical measures:
- Anonymization
- Encryption
- Proxy Network
- Preventing deanonymization
Human Web data is transmitted in fully encrypted form via a proxy network. This ensures that we know nothing about the user when the data reaches us, since the proxy network removes the user’s individual IP address. We simply receive the IP address of the proxy network and cannot derive users from this. The actual proxies are not capable of reading the encrypted information or finding out anything about it. Sender and content are therefore kept completely separate. The possibility of tracking is strictly excluded.
The way we record and store data also precludes any subsequent de-anonymization and profiling. Neither Cliqz’ employees nor third parties can create user profiles by connecting several data points, because the data stored on the server do not at all contain any reference points. Your anonymity is assured at all times! Even if we wanted to or were obliged to do so by law, we could never share or sell personally identifiable information, because our Privacy by Design architecture makes it technically impossible to store such data on our servers.
You don’t have to believe us. Just see for yourself! Cliqz’s software code is open source and freely accessible to everyone on GitHub.
In addition, our product is regularly audited internally and externally: TÜV Saarland, Mozilla, researchers from Princeton University and RedTeam Pentesting were involved in external audits.
Cliqz GmbH is headquartered in Munich and majority-owned by internationally operating media and technology company Hubert Burda Media. In August 2016, Mozilla announced a strategic investment in Cliqz to enable innovation of privacy-focused search experiences.
Cliqz operates completely independently of other Burda entities, does not exchange any data with them and does not treat Burda’s own websites differently than others (e. g. in search ranking or anti-tracking). You can easily verify this by trying it yourself.
Cliqz is breaking new ground not only with its innovative quick search engine and AI-powered anti-tracking, but also with its business model: we are the first service to combine targeting with consistent data privacy and protection. We are currently testing a new technology called MyOffrz, which allows companies and brands to show you relevant offers directly in your browser – in a completely private and safe way.
Learn more about how MyOffrz works and the underlying technology: