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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Here is a simple question, why do Mozilla not have a policy that dictate that any increase in data collection from one version to the next must either be opt-in or follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia), and a clear update to the privacy policy. Bureaucracy can be helpful in creating trust that important changes won't just sneak up on people unannounced.

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> documented process with the community, in public

You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.

The original announcement was: "FYI: We're going to do this, next monday", that announcement was on a Saturday. If you think that qualifies then we've different ideas about how this should get discussed.

Even if they meant Monday 26th, that's not a lot of time to have a proper discussion.

So what does that process look like? Is there a formal process with clear method on how and when the decision is made, how it get propagate into a decision and how the documentation and announcement to users will be?

Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list.

There is: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection

> follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia)

Is this not exactly what is happening in the bug tracker and the mailing list?

Certainly not 'lengthy', and I don't think "with the community". The initial state of this was two-day warning saying "this is happening Monday", which might count as prior notice but certainly isn't a dialogue.

You can find the policies and procedures around data collection at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection

FYI, I work at Mozilla but don't speak for Mozilla.

Thank you (and chuckharmston above). The policy is rather significant to the discussion and a major starting point in discussing this kind of additional collection in firefox.

Going by the bug report for the TRR, I am seeing that the request did not follow all the questions in the request form such as #3. Additionally the bug ticket got a science review but its unclear if that qualify as a "data steward" reviewing it, and there is no Data Review Form as specified by the policy. It is unclear from the ticket in which category of data collection the ticket should be classified under and if the opt-out is correctly applied in this case.

As for the data collection policy itself, I am not seeing a few key questions that as a user I would like to know in order to inspire trust in the project. How long is the data retained? What anonymizing technique if any is applied? Is there a minimum time for discussion so that enough time is given for people to discover the ticket and contribute?

> TRR

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