"These are used by Mozilla to spy on you, and are as such a significant risk to privacy."
Wow that's a big claim. Any proofs that the data collected is not anonymous? It sounds a lot like fear-mongering
Wow that's a big claim. Any proofs that the data collected is not anonymous? It sounds a lot like fear-mongering
Companies should be transparent about the data they collect and how they anonymize it – and should be easily disabled if needed if you need serious privacy, as is possible that some resourceful actor could de-anonymize the information somehow. But this kind of data is not necessarily harmful.
People disabling telemetry will often be the same ones complaining about "poorly written applications and company X should know better". Well they don't because you disabled telemetry, now the company or organization has no data to improve anything, be it performance, crashes or even UI. Bug reports are not enough.
No.
Using Firefox as an example, look at how many improvements they have made over the last 5 years. I'm not here to argue whether we need these feature or if Firefox 2 was the last version of Firefox that we needed. Firefox (or Chrome, or whatever) wouldn't look as great as it does today without lots of data.
So telemetry doesn't always improve the user experience.
If violating user's privacy is your way to stay competitive, then that's your personal problem. You have no right to spy on everyone just because you have problems staying relevant.
This is the sort of argument that gets thrown around often, and I disagree completely --- data collection should always be opt-in, not opt-out. Normalising the invasion of privacy and subverting the default expectation thereof is harmful to individual freedom.
Respect the users: let them tell you what they want, when they want, and how they want. Don't paternalistically monitor them or tell them what they should/"really" want.
To expand on this a bit, the past several years advertisers and attention brokers have focused on the difference between stated preferences and observed behavior, optimizing for the latter. Unfortunately it seems optimizing for observed behavior amplifies the worst of our base instincts, so even if it improves the bottom line in the short term, we are degrading our civilization in the process.
It's possible a similar discrepancy between behavior and intention exists in UI telemetry. Ask people what they want when at their best, don't optimize for measurements of them at their worst.
A datum isn't anonymous unless proven otherwise. Today's "practically anonymous" is tomorrow's "deanonymized".
You can read about our data collection approval process here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection
An IP address would be Category 4 - I think it is pretty much impossible to get approval for category 4.
I highly doubt we have any products out there that actually collect Category 4 data.
I've accepted it as a given that if I interact with a website, it will know my IP, but "phoning home" is a slightly different matter.
Or .. just talk to someone on the team and ask questions. Mozilla is incredibly open and transparent. Anyone can even join team/product meetings on video chat.
Good idea:
Step #1: read modules/libpref/Preferences.cpp
Step #2: default all function calls to `PREF_SetBoolPref` for `kTelemetryPref` with args true to false; remove all `PREF_LockPref` calls with kTelemetryPref
Step #3: ./mach build