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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

No, you cannot block it via umatrix or any other extension. If you read the whole discussion you will see that this only was possible in the old extension tech that Mozilla meanwhile replaced with webextension. And those can't.

They injected a non-removable external tracking system right into the browser that they market as privacy focussed.

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Actually, if you read to the bottom of the discussion [0] you'll see that it was fixed, and FF respects the Do Not Track setting.

In addition, they negotiated with google special terms for their analytics. This is the description [1] and this is the resulting options they got [2].

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785#issue...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14

[2] https://bug697436.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=73207...

It is not fixed. You still cannot disable the tracking via an extension like umatrix.

And no, I do not set the 'do not track' thing. Because that is one more bit of data sent out. To every website. Not just to Mozilla.

Actually more then a computer 'bit' by the way. What percentage of users use the 'do not track' setting? Let's say 1%. Voila. Setting it is worth about 7 bits of data to identify you.

I don't mean to be rude, but if you're worried about the "do not track" setting identifying, you honestly shouldn't be on the internet. Or you should be using it like rms does [1] (scroll to "How I use the internet").

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I agree with you in that I don't like it - I was just providing some more information on the issue, from presumably the same source you made your comment from.

In terms of a Debian firefox etc, I would worry about two things:

1. You'd be fragmenting the non-corporate* browser market, weakening the good that can come of that. Mozilla are invited to the table at browser discussions, Debzilla probably won't be.

2. You're reliant on the upstream from Mozilla, so you're still needing them to be big enough to continue to generate the base software the fork is coming off.

I don't consider Mozilla to be a bad actor and in fact like them a lot (although you may feel differently) however they have done multiple anti-user actions I don't agree with (this would be one of the lesser ones).

How are firefox design choices steered? Is it just at the whim of the corporation? If not, what would be the best way to become politically active in steering design choices like these in a pro-privacy pro-user direction? It seems like there are enough people with a similar sentiment on Hacker News to provide political weight to these issues.

*yes, strictly speaking Mozilla are corporate but I would say there are appreciable differences between them and Google, Microsoft, etc

> 1. You'd be fragmenting the non-corporate* browser market, weakening the good that can come of that. Mozilla are invited to the table at browser discussions, Debzilla probably won't be.

You mean the tables where they then give in to making copyright a standard and giving legitimacy to that standard by staying on that table?

Fragmentation is not a pure evil.

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