And for some reason they always feel the urge to name drop the current CEO.
Microsoft is the General Motors of computer software. They rode high and then rested on their laurels. They learned that they can't sell an operating system directly to consumers, so they're trying to steal users away from macOS and Ubuntu so their spyware OS can make them money that way.
All of them will betray your trust, either through maliciousness or incompetence. All major Linux distributions ship Firefox as the preferred default browser, which would be considered spyware if it were held to the same standards that Microsoft is held to. And even if they didn't, odds are you'll screw something up and get hacked (nobody, not even DJB, is perfect).
If you really want privacy, don't use a computer.
- portal detection is a plain GET request - no actual data is sent - Google Analytics is used on Mozilla Web pages, not Firefox itself - default search engines are meaningless, as you can pick which one to use and not even suggestions are requested without opt-in - FHR I believe is still opt-in and also contains no PII - Pocket does absolutely nothing unless you manually register and log in - Auto updates are only on Mac and Windows, but if you're using either of those, you really can't complain here
That site is a good resource, but it is extremely exaggerating the situation - and that's not ok. Once you label Firefox as "spyware level HIGH", what do you call something like Windows 10? Firefox has a few opt-out points of telemetry that share no PII and aren't correlatable by design, whereas Windows 10 has no opt-out and automatically sends everything from local search queries to full binaries back to the mothership.
Saying everything is bad isn't helping anyone. We need to work on getting people off the things that actually violate their privacy (Windows, most Google products, FB, Web trackers...) and only then start working on improving the lesser offenders.
Which is why anyone truly privacy conscious would use a distro or OS that isn't mainstream. My personal preferences for obscure OSes are Void Linux and OpenBSD. Void has a barebones installer image without any desktop software, you can build that up into whatever you want with whichever browser you prefer. A good simple setup would be something like i3 or dwm with the Surf browser.
With OpenBSD you do get a basic desktop window manager, but no browser is installed by default and the authors of that project are extremely privacy aware and security focused.
> If you really want privacy, don't use a computer.
I would amend that to "...don't use the Internet". A computer without a network connection isn't giving away your secrets, but even the most locked-down device can still leak data as soon as it's on a network, especially the Internet. Your ISP is fingerprinting you right now and there's not a damn thing you can do about that.