If they start opt-out tracking using the same approach as Google I do not see any reason to use it nor install it for my friends and family. That's some data for you, Mozilla.
You want Firefox to succeed as a browser, but to be able to better compete it needs better usage data.
Wouldn't you prefer for Firefox to be the best browser available, AND also be considerate towards your privacy rights?
I prefer absolute privacy over some minor advantages on irrelevant webpages.
How do you even think this system would work in restricted environments such as governments where even the presence of code that could collect data is an absolute no-go?
And if the way Mozilla gathers data is much more considerate, what results can I expect from it? Better parallel requests and data fetching, hardware acceleration, etc are all features that are missing for me as a Linux user. They don't need my dataset for that, it's probably all in their bug tracker.
At this point why would anyone stay with the company B which broke its promise once, just in the hope that it won't break the promise again? It has already lost the trustworthiness and it also has the worse product. Might as well use products from company A.
Privacy is not a boolean.
If yes (and that’s what you get when you choose opt-out), then we’re done. There is no gradual change there, it’s a binary question if you value the user or your own benefit more.
And that’s strictly incompatible with mine.
First ask, then fuck up. Is that concept so hard to understand?
If you’d do that IRL to someone they’d never talk to you again, it’s the same with Firefox if they do this.
And of course this all started with you saying that you may as well switch to another company's products, a company which you know violates your privacy quite significantly. You still haven't explained why Firefox collecting a small amount of data in a way that tries to minimize any privacy violations means you should just give up any semblance of privacy and use a product that tries to collect as much personal information as possible.
I’ve dealt with these issues before myself.
And I understand well what they collect, how, and why. I understand how painful it is when you have no data on what is used, and how, or not even crashreports.
But there also is a limit to how far you can go, and where consent is required.
And when transmitting anything, or collecting anything, consent is required.
You could make it dependent on situation. If a performance issue occurs, show a bar: "Is this website slow? Click [Here] to submit a report so it can be improved. [Details] [X] Always submit".
This gives the user a far better understanding of what is submitted, why it is needed, it is contextual, and it is still opt-in (but with far better conversion)
For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy for instance.
If the mechanism works, fine, but why should I use Firefox over Chromium then? Opt-out data collection is in violation to my core beliefs and what I believed to be Mozilla's principles.
Collecting data without asking the user about it is - to me - in violation to the very definition of privacy and calling some way to anonymise data (who guarantees that the cryptographic approach to this is not obsolete in a few years?) "differential privacy" is at the very least dishonest.
Two - DP is only really private over a small data set per individual. If DP were enabled for even two days, you could get a very accurate picture of the sites I visit, since a majority of the domains reported would be necessarily be accurate values.
Two: That's an interesting question. You'd need to ask it to someone with more domain knowledge than me.
Here's a concern that comes up from that implementation option: any outliers from the set of existing domains (which would likely simply be implemented as a list of strings) would immediately be able to be called out as a "True" value, while a single reporting of a domain could reliably called out as a "False" value. Unless, of course, you choose a randomization algorithm which exhibits a very strong clustering trait.
You could also limit reports to those domains which are in the whitelist, but that would voluntarily neuter the reporting; something they seem less-than-eager to do.
Ultimately, it will all come down to the implementation details, which are unlikely to be available until after the opt-in release, and auditable by a remarkably small number of people in the open source community.