Note that Mozilla trusted us enough to invest in Cliqz, and we passed their security and privacy audit before they started their experiment with our search in the dropdown. At this time we did also built prototypes together for webextension APIs that would be able to tweak the url bar's behaviour.
Unfortunately, as we mentioned in a previous post [1], Mozilla is not totally independent when it comes to the presentation of search in Firefox due to their existing search deals, so they couldn't continue with the integration. This is why we needed our fork.
This is our anti-tracking tech we include in the Cliqz browser and also in the Ghostery Extension. We have another post lined up in the series on this (in a couple of weeks), but it's also been described in our blog posts[1] and our 2016 paper[2].
"It may seem like Common Crawl would suffice for this purpose, but it has poor coverage outside of the US and its update frequency is not realistic for use in a search engine."
Hi, I work at Cliqz on our Anti-tracking system, and the WhoTracks.Me data that powers these stats on the search page.
These stats are updated monthly, and based on millions of loads of each site. The WhoTracks.Me page for wikipedia.org (https://whotracks.me/websites/wikipedia.org.html) shows that the Google Fonts and Google Static trackers occur very infrequently (<2% of pages), so may be on some part of the site that you did not visit.
While the Wikimedia tracker may seem innocuous, they do set a cookie that is sent in third-party contexts, and have presence across several sites beyond Wikipedia (133 of the top 10k) (https://whotracks.me/trackers/wikimedia.org.html). Theoretically, they could track user sessions across these sites. In reality this is likely an oversight in the server configuration, but objectively this profile looks no different to that of a legitimate tracker.
Unfortunately, as we mentioned in a previous post [1], Mozilla is not totally independent when it comes to the presentation of search in Firefox due to their existing search deals, so they couldn't continue with the integration. This is why we needed our fork.
Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz
[1]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozi...