Anyone have thoughts on the opt-out telemetry default?
I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.
I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.
Edit: Wow, downvotes for opposing pervasive telemetry. Now that is scary...
This is not paranoia, scummy software developers have actually sent much more than crash reports. And crash reports may contain private information anyway.
Before anyone says Mozilla is different: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...
i have seen this article already 5 times on this post, what is the point?
As far as i remember you can read the whole automated bug report or even modify it. did i miss something?
It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps, but desktop apps trigger our suspicion meter.
With web apps any telemetry data is pretty much limited to things on that domain. Browsers have access to more in principle.
I guess if the data transmitted is not personally-identifying or profile-building then it's fine. E.g. number of sites only, not urls. On second glance at the new FF page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ it seems like the stuff they collect is pretty innocuous. Paranoia ftw.
Because Mozilla.
2. Chances are significantly lower considering that this collaboration started only recently on the new installs from the website. Judging by his comment, I don't think he's a new Firefox user.
Of course, the chance is still there, but I would argue that it's low enough to be negligible, at least for him.
It's natural because in some sense, a webapp is more like regular visiting a site; and just like the fact that my requests to websites will show up in their server logs is, for the most part, not really a concern. To use an analogy, "if you want to have a conversation, both sides need to be able to contact each other." But when software is monitoring what I'm doing with it, and reporting to one central site, when I'm visiting other sites? That just evokes "do not want". I don't care if it's Mozilla or Google or whoever else. Just. Stop. Watching. Me.
FWIW in Firefox nightly (maybe also beta?) if you flip the privacy.firstparty.isolate then the fact that websites can talk to each other is severely reduced; basically third party iframes get their own set of cookies for each domain they're embedded in, so tracking iframes know about each other less. Flipping this pref will log you out of everything though (only the one time), and some sites don't work with it (nothing major so far, and you can file a bug. In many cases it's the site relying on iframes in a weird way).
Edit: Ah, this is a part of Firefox. It looks like they're using some crypto/privacy features such that "aggregation is not technically feasible".
Strongly blinding stuff that way isn't new; e.g. the safe browsing stuff uses differential privacy.
And at the server where it's sent to, it gets disconnected from the IP address and intermixed with other people's browsing history. So, it's not stored in personally identifiable form and therefore not vulnerable there either.
Mozilla has also made an official statement that neither they nor Cliqz store personally identifiable information as part of this, so doing it anyways would be misleading of consumers, i.e. breaking the law.
Not to mention that it would violate German privacy laws (which is where it's currently being tested), if they collected personally identifiable information without clearly notifying the user and at least some checkbox that the user has to tick.
It's easy to spin this, so that it sounds like Mozilla is doing pure evil here, but it's just not the case.
Mozilla's track record of software that aligns with FLOSS principles makes me trust them when they release new software which they claim aligns with FLOSS principles.
But if Mozilla engages in what you call "suspicious behavior," it seems like a bad idea to assume that it's ok because of Mozilla's track record. In fact, I'd go in the other direction and say that suspicious behavior from Mozilla is enough of an anomaly that you should pay more attention to it, not less.