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Comment by bedosh | Hacker News Reader

How is Mozilla gathering personal data from people using WebThings? When I tried WebThings Gateway a few months back, it did not seem to collect/send personal data off site. It allows you to create a public endpoint as a subdomain of mozilla-iot.org for easy off site access (https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Gateway-Remote-Acce...) which would allow some tracking I assume, but in general I have noticed no hidden data collection as your comment implies.

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>It allows you to create a public endpoint as a subdomain of mozilla-iot.org for easy off site access (https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Gateway-Remote-Acce...) which would allow some tracking I assume, but in general I have noticed no hidden data collection as your comment implies.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's not about keylogging your passwords or getting into your bank accounts. It's about the subtle metadata they'll be able to skim to start fingerprinting you for advertising profiles, and integrating into learning models. It just disgusts me that this has become the defacto behavior for every tech company now rather than "we want nothing to do with any of your analytics". Data is the new oil times 10, and this is Mozilla doing some exploration.

> for easy off site access Exactly. The WebThings Gateway on an RPi is behind a firewall. How to access it? Mozilla makes it easy for users to securely access their gateway when remote, by setting up a tunneling service for the .mozilla-iot.org subdomains that users configure during the setup process. Mozilla has to pay* for running the https tunneling services that allow this security. Mozilla wants to protect your security; they do not want your data. The subdomain enables Mozilla's setup process to download and install the cert for the subdomain you create (from LetsEncrypt) onto the gateway, so you don't have to figure it out on your own. If you have your own registered domain name and know how to install its cert and then expose and port forward 443 from your router to the WebThings gateway, Mozilla would be happy because that reduces their tunneling expense. The goal was to make it easy for users to run a secure gateway by default. But with an OpenWrt router approach, appropriate firewall rules and dynamic dns can help reduce the need for the tunneling service, yet keep things secure. Maybe eventually ordering your own complete domain could be part of the setup process, but you'd be paying some 3rd party to make that happen, whereas the subdomain approach keeps it free.

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