Hacker News Reader

Comment by napo | Hacker News Reader

The downvotes seems a bit unfair. I think this is a good comment. Any chance you could give more info on which metrics they're looking at though? Because if it's mainly CPU usage and the like it doesn't seem to be a big concern.

View on HN

If you load about:telemetry in Firefox, it will tell you what information is being collected, link to various documentation, etc. It also tells you whether telemetry is actually enabled right now or not, and links to the preference section where you can enable/disable telemetry.

The set of telemetry collected by default depends on the build channel: release builds collect much less data than nightly or beta.

You can also see exactly what data Firefox engineers can see at https://telemetry.mozilla.org/ -- there is no special behind-a-login view for this stuff that I know of.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox.

The problem is there are more lines of telemetry than most projects have code. You should probably have it audited - or better yet - just remove the telemetry.

That is the great thing about firefox, when I disable the telemetry which they make extremely easy to do. I can be certain that it is actually disabled. Unlike the shady practices Chrome uses where I never feel comfortable or like they are telling me the whole story. Hidden options and settings force me to not be able to feel safe using their product after an update. I have stopped using Chrome entirely over 3 years ago and have no tried it since. Too many shady and irresponsible practices at play there.

How can you be certain about Firefox? They did disable all addons due to a "failed certficate update" and then proceeded to bash Chrome for 2 weeks about a fake story of adblocker addons being blocked, which turned out to be completely false, then they had two 0day exploits in 2 days. Same can't be said for Chrome or Chromium, which actually has video decoding hardware acceleration on Linux because they are more serious advocates for open source.

Telemetry probes in Firefox/Gecko go through a common telemetry core that contains a kill switch. That code is located at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone.... Have fun.

Not all probes are active at all times. They are all defined in the descriptors that I’m including links for. [1][2]

They all include expiry dates, and probes with perpetual lifetimes require devs to take responsibility for them.

All probes need to go through the data collection process outlined at [3].

[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

[2] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection

What kind of audit?

Every telemetry probe requires a privacy review in addition to the code review. If you want more, the source code is available online. Do you have more in mind?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com