Interview

December 17, 2018

Why German search-engine Cliqz says the internet must prepare for when we "all turn evil"

The German privacy-centric search engine Cliqz deals with trust issues by avoiding personal data altogether.


Layli Foroudi

8 min read

Google’s tagline was “don’t be evil” until May this year when it quietly removed the catchphrase from its code of conduct. The take of German search engine Cliqz is more like “assume we will all turn evil”. Cliqz CEO Marc Al-Hames believes in preparing for the worst. He doesn’t collect or store any identifiable data from internet users and as a consequence, he’s not asking you to trust him with it. “If the government or a hacker gets access to our servers, or if an employee turns evil or if Cliqz turns evil as a company; the data we have at our backend should never be sufficient to identify a user or what a user has been doing,” Al-Hames said in an interview with Sifted.

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