Someone can explain what's the reason to disable telemetry? Telemetry data is anonymized and important for Firefox development. What and how is transferred is documented well. If certain measures are suggested, there should be given a reasoning.
You're taking it for granted that the reported data is adequately anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science.
As mentioned later in the article, Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be.
Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely.
For example, TLS 1.0 (and 1.1) is deprecated and will be disabled by mutual agreement among browser vendors in 2020. On the road there, Firefox are watching their telemetry to determine how many users are affected and how much effort it's appropriate to put into mitigating difficulties for those who have systems that can't be upgraded.
For me this will go fine, I don't have any systems that aren't capable of TLS 1.2 and very few that can't do TLS 1.3 so my telemetry data will show all is well. Maybe you are not so lucky. Too bad, you've disabled telemetry so nobody is coming to help. Bye.
Yours won't count double unless there are only two users, in which case decision makers will likely disregard telemetry data all together.
You're right that the individual's usage pattern isn't directly considered, but for most users that won't matter because their usage patterns aren't uncommon. If you're one of a small group of users that do $weirdThing and that group is so small that your individual telemetry data contributes significantly, a) that group will likely be ignored and b) anonymizing is a problem you may not want to be involved in as a user.
I've not worked at Mozilla, but that's how I've seen it happen just about every time I ever saw telemetry get cited in situations I had some insider insight into.
Edited to add: my comment makes it sound like there is some other way to tell from telemetry data which users are more socially influential. That's not the case as far as I know.
A single power user who happens to be a system administrator for a public school district has the power to install or uninstall hundreds of firefox instances. And it was power users that spread word-of-mouth awareness of firefox the most during the days when firefox was actually growing. Continue to treat them as equals to all other users and I predict firefox will continue its tragic slide into obscurity.
The way I see it, "data driven" design is often similar to an over-reliance on standardized testing or zero-tolerance policies; a way of abdicating responsibility for a decision and covering your own ass. "Users hate this but I'm not to blame because I was just going off the data" has become the new "Sure everything ended up going sideways, but can you really blame me for buying IBM? Nobody gets fired for buying IBM."
Where is the data to suggest that data-driven design actually produces the desired results? That seems to be missing.
It increases the chances that Firefox developers address performance and other problems that are affecting you. If you disable telemetry, your problems "don't count" when doing data-driven prioritization of development work. (note: I'm a Mozilla employee, working on gecko)
[1] https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
But when the matter is less concrete because the value of one particular minority demographic is hard to pin down in the collected data (from what in the mozilla's telemetry data can you persuasively derive the value of power users who tell their friends and family to use firefox? Uncovering those relationships would certainly violate users' privacy..) then "data driven" decision processes will by default assume all users have equal worth.
I think that even if telemetry had had different results, they would have then just ignored it for making that decision. Or they would have changed the interface to hide a feature, and then when users used it less, they would use that as justification to remove something.
There was really no good reason to remove it. They quantified the costs of keeping it at something like $5000. How much do they spend translating Firefox into obscure languages that nobody downloads? Or on catering for their galas and fundraisers? Or any other stuff not related to writing software?
There is much more robust discussion on this already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18202028
I don't doubt that someone at Mozilla could de-anonymize that data, but I have enough trust in the organization that they won't
> Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be.
Even if Mozilla are completely trustworthy, nothing is stopping them from being forced to give up all that data with a national security letter (accompanied with the customary gag order), to be mined for insights by alphabet agencies.
I can /maybe/ if I squint really hard, imagine some murder detective figuring out a way that a value in their suspect's telemetry data helps prove they did it. Only thing is, the murder cop can just ask a judge to let them go take the suspect's whole PC, no need to bother any Mozilla employees with crazy requests.
"Boss, I just got done with that $500Bn compute job to work out a guy's password as you recommended, rather than just resetting it by email as I'd originally thought of doing. As you pointed out the government can just raise income taxes to pay for it"
"Cool, OK, now I want you to go threaten this company CEO. They collect optional telemetry data and we'd like to extort that CEO into telling us whether a user with this IP address has an Intel or AMD processor"
"Shouldn't I just get them to export the data from their software directly rather than bother with all this? Or just use any of these broadly available malware techniques to get the answer for the user we care about?"
"No, that would be simpler and cheaper, if we do it this way only a true genius like zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC would realise what we're up to, as ever our goal is collect anything but only in the most elaborate way possible so that it's tremendously expensive and difficult"
"OK, but what if the user has disabled telemetry?"
"Then we'll have to think of an even more expensive and elaborate way to collect data. We have a programme to teach goldfish to swim differently depending on whether they have recently seen anybody wearing a T-shirt with a specific logo design on it."
That one pissed me off, just on principle.
I'm not sure exactly what's happened in the last 10 years or so but, at some point, everyone apparently just decided it was okay to start spying on their users (read: "telemetry"). Mozilla and some others, at least, allow you to "opt out" -- although you should never have to! -- as if that somehow makes it okay.
Then, a while back, they decided they were going to go ahead and send in some "telemetry" even if the user has explicitly disabled telemetry!
I can easily remember a time -- and it wasn't that long ago! -- when slipping in even the slightest hint of "telemetry" without a clear, explicit "opt-in" from the user would have been absolutely unheard of.
Mozilla doesn't have much of a user base left. You'd think they would try to avoid alienating us and pissing us off.
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On a related note -- and with the above in mind -- I recently (within the last several days) started working on my own .js "preferences" to lock Firefox down as much as I can. I've just posted it [1] if anyone is interested (a lot of it was taken from [2]).
Disclaimer: it's very much still a work-in-progress, likely breaks things that I haven't noticed yet, and almost certainly is not what you want to use. I'm fairly happy with it at the moment, however. (There's a bunch of "notes to self" in there that I tried to remove; if I missed any, please just ignore them!)
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri... (see the "Telemetry Coverage" section)
And where, and when. That's pretty sensitive information.
Both can be addressed by batching uploads, as described in the gp comment.
> the clientId, a UUID identifying a profile and allowing user-oriented correlation of data
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...
On line anonymity is a myth. Why do we keep spreading it?
Online anonymity is an entirely different topic than whether this one data set collected here is effectively anonymized.
> Technical data: Firefox sends data about your Firefox version and language; device operating system and hardware configuration; memory, basic information about crashes and errors; outcome of automated processes like updates, safebrowsing, and activation to us. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs.
> Read the telemetry documentation for Desktop, Android, or iOS or learn how to opt-out of this data collection on Desktop and Mobile.
If that's OK for you, fine. Not for me.