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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

The Firefox Monitor is not a telemetry study. It's this:

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/06/25/testing-f...

This extension is listed under about:debugging.. the same place where you'll see other features like Pocket, Form Autofill, and Firefox Screenshots.

It's a new Firefox feature. It's not alarming, and it's not Firefox installing things without your permission.

Complaining about this is literally complaining that the new version you just installed has a new feature. If a new version didn't change anything, they wouldn't need a new version.

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> Complaining about this is literally complaining that the new version you just installed has a new feature.

A hundred times this.

The article is misleading click-bait taking advantage of people's historical aversion towards drive-by downloads of malicious add-ons. Mozilla could have just as easily implemented this directly in the browser and this article probably wouldn't have been written, or if it was, it would have at least focused on the legitimate question about telemetry.

There is a legitimate debate worth having here, but basing the complaint on the good code hygiene practiced by Mozilla developers is silly.

Meanwhile, every web page you visit leaks the fact of your existence a hundred different ways and 99% of us don't care much.

That post isn't explicitly about a Firefox Monitor extension, and I could only find this rollout to US users mentioned on 3rd party websites. Those posts include BugZilla links, but they're restricted.

I can easily disable Pocket, Autofill, and Screenshots in about:config, and Firefox support explains that. With this extension, I'm missing a "extensions.fxmonitor.enabled" option.

I understand it's good to build in optional security features like this, but I don't see how it's acceptable to not notify users or provide an opt-out.

here's an article about the add-on: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/08/25/firefox-62-firefox-monitor...

They are missing the about:config setting.. but it's early. Might be a bug, or maybe its not being used(?)

Eventually it'll display a popup in the UI that will notify you if the website you're on has been breached. I think we can all agree that would be useful.

Edit: Here's the code for the add-on: https://github.com/mozilla/blurts-addon

Sure, it's a useful feature, but my password manager (1Password) already does it. I'm OK with testing out this extension regardless, but wouldn't be if I wanted to limit my data use like the post's author.

So reading that ghacks article, it goes live to all EN-US users on the 25th Sept (my browser already has it), but we can't switch it off yet via: about:config?filter=extensions.fxmonitor.enabled

Pretty poor to roll it out without the option of disabling it, especially as I also ticked no tracking.

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