Being super duper clear about having sent the full URL history of users to a third party doesn't excuse you from the fact that you, well, sent the full URL history of users to a third party.
And unless the entire leadership of the Mozilla Corporation has been replaced since then (a wet dream of mine) that blog entry is relevant, since they've done it and they could do it again.
Are you saying that nothing could ever excuse that fact?
Cliqz is building a European, independent privacy-oriented search engine. This seems a worthy reason to me, especially with the complete and total transparency here. And in any case, the experiment has ended.
I still maintain your comments are misleading, by leaving out the context.
Setting aside whether Cliqz could be trusted or not, just think of it: this is a decision that went through lots of managers in the Mozilla Corporation, and nobody ever stopped to think for a moment "sending the entire URL history of our users to a third party? well this is wrong". This is the kind of decision that should've led to lots of resignations inside the company, but nothing happened. To me this means there's something deeply rotten inside Mozilla. What kind of assurance do I have that they won't pull this off again in the future? And let's remember that they are strapped for cash, so it's not like they don't have an incentive to sell private user data again.
"nobody ever stopped to think" is used constantly, yet is almost never the truth. What is infinitely more likely is that many people raised eyebrows and were assured by someone way above their pay grade that "everything is fine". Calling Mozilla "deeply rotten" is an extreme leap that (imo) is not justified.
And unless the entire leadership of the Mozilla Corporation has been replaced since then (a wet dream of mine) that blog entry is relevant, since they've done it and they could do it again.