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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

just another reason to avoid it. mandatory telemetry, mandatory pulseaudio in linux, pocket, that weird failed video chat thing, and the DRM add-on that literally no one asked for.

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You have options to decline sending any potentially personal data back, and then telemetry would include only basic, anonymised usage info to help them improve Firefox. Pocket is now part of Mozilla and you can still just remove the button from the toolbar and ignore it completely. I assume that video chat thing was only ever proof-of-concept, at least I don't see it anywhere anymore. As for EME, well, most people want their Netflix/Hulu fix. If Mozilla declined to support EME then they'll quickly become obsolete.

> telemetry would include only basic, anonymised usage info to help them improve Firefox.

This is unacceptable. Why can't I turn it off completely?

I believe Santosh83 means even if you leave it on, it will be anonymized performance data

You can't anonymize data in transit since it requires a sender IP which makes the sent performance data susceptible to interception and analysis by intermediaries.

It's boring data, encrypted in transit (HTTPS). About the only thing intermediaries can learn is that someone used Firefox at the time of the request.

Seems like you can turn it off completely (except it still collects some data but does not actually send it to Mozilla), but you need to read the docs and toggle some about:config preferences.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...

Personally I'd just uncheck all the options exposed in the UI and trust that Mozilla is not collecting stuff behind my back, at least not data that can be de-anonymised.

And use what instead? Out of all the mainstream options, Firefox is the best when it comes to privacy and giving users the power.

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

I'm seeing a checkbox to disable DRM content playing in preferences. I know it's just one item in your list, but at least it's an option.

> mandatory telemetry Explain? > mandatory pulseaudio Don’t know enough to have an opinion on this > pocket Does FF send data if you don’t use the feature? Actually not sure. > video chat thing You’re avoiding a browser because of… a feature you don’t use? > DRM add-on literally no one asked for …except for the tiny fraction of FF users that are also Netflix subscribers

Don’t forget the plugins which are a shell of their former selves.

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