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Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

It is not surveillance or spying ffs!!!! It is telemetry, which is anonymized data for the purpose of statistics and crash analysis.

remember, you can check the source code. You can build your own version. Telemetry helps people. Telemetry helps Mozilla deliver better firefox. STOP SPREADING FUD.

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Im sure ad companies claim much the same thing, tracking is just telemetry for statistical anonymized bulk purposes, that is really just benefiting the user!

The point is you cant have it both ways, both decrying tracking of users and then actively enaging in it, and agressively defending it when it comes to light.

Except for the part where you completely ignored their point that you and anyone else with security concerns can conduct their own audit of the code and verify whether or not the telemetry functionality is performing in the manner described.

show me where i can audit the google play store analytics code, or what is running on their servers.

Focus and Klar do not use the Google Play Store Analytics. Mozilla has their own Telemetry service. This documentation is a good start: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Telemet...

You have to understand how extremely strict Mozilla is with using third-party services for things like crash reporting and telemetry. It is extremely difficult to find services that meet our very high standard for privacy.

Yet this thread is about how the firefox APKs contain google analytics code....

My guess is that it is a dependency of the Adjust SDK that Focus uses. See https://github.com/adjust/android_sdk/blob/master/README.md

Wait... Focus doesn't use Google Analytics because they don't meet your very high standards for privacy. But it does use Adjust, which means Adjust does meet your very high standards, even though it uses Google Analytics?

This is a misunderstanding. Adjust does not use google analytics. You are connecting unrelated things. The existence of a library, which actually is not a google analytics library, does not mean at all this app talks to google servers.

AFAIK Focus and Adjust make no connections to google. Check the source?

But Adjust only comes into play when the app is installed by clicking on a Google ad campaign. So at that point, Google already knows you've clicked on the ad and installed the app (because that's how they bill Mozilla).

I don’t think Adjust is for Google ad campaigns actually. It is used for links we put in our emails or in Firefox desktop. Or for ads that we buy on Facebook. I don’t think there is any connection to google.

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