Mozilla people - this is a serious issue. If you want to champion privacy, you NEED to have a big red button that says "nothing gets sent out" and you NEED to have an end-to-end test to make sure Firefox respects it.
It’s not like they use it to build a profile of you, as goddamn chrome does.
I feel that whatever Mozilla does can never be good enough for some people, even though they are one of the most important players in the “fight” of OSS. Just think about it, linux is only usable as a desktop OS because most of the desktop apps migrated to the web - and firefox is the only free browser that is actually capable, as well as the only engine that is not google-controlled. We should support them as much as we can.
It’s great that you consent. In that instance it is fine. Many do not, and to proceed with the assumption of consent should be a crime.
What is done with the data is irrelevant. Spying without explicit consent is the problem.
Eh? Says who? Them?
So many times, companies have lied, cheated, made excuses. So many times "we don't", then they do.
So. Many. Times.
So I should just trust Mozilla, because... well, why?
And this doesn't even take into account new corporate owners, leveraging existing data in a new way. Or rogue elements in corps, employees stealing data for profit, or even data leakage due to misconfigured servers.
These thongs have all happened.
Corps have left dumps of entire client databases, credit cards, id, on open portals!
Over and over, again and again, we have been shown, never ever trust anyone with your data. Ever.
Disable "datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled" and Firefox will not send telemetry data around. But users cannot be expected to mess around in about:config, right? That why there is a checkbox in the Firefox preferences just for this. In the Privacy & Security tab.
Also, when you create a fresh Firefox profile (e.g. when you use it for the first time), it will open their privacy policy page, with a somewhat hidden button that brings you straight to those checkboxes. I don't like that it's a bit hidden now by default, and they could do better there (and actually did better in the past, where there was a very visible popup asking you about this stuff).
As for "they should test this!": Right, and they do have unit tests[2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t... [2] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
I had the Preferences option Off for years and yet there was a laundry list of telemetry options enabled in about:config.
This is shady as fuck if you pardon my French. Completely unacceptable.
Best is irrelevant - it's not good enough.