What the GP was saying was that there was no essential technical reason for Firefox to send telemetry data to Mozilla (unless you're connecting to Mozilla).
And yet, Firefox does this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
And yet, Firefox does this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
It's the psychology of "well, it's already sharing some data. what's the harm in a little more?" There will always be people that want minimal data sharing, and I'm one of them, but the vocal minority are exactly that - the minority. The majority of users don't actually care, which is why the data harvesting industry is as big as it is - plenty of data out there to harvest.
They don't care until it directly affects them personally somehow, and then suddenly they instantly forget that it happened because they allowed it to happen, and they make a huge noise about it as if it's the first time they heard about it.
Not nearly as vehemently as with Audacity.
There are good and legitimate reasons for collecting user data, but many of us think it should be voluntarily, minimal and at least not shared with anyone for anything but its original purpose.
In fact we had a very interesting court case in Høgsterett (kind of Supreme Court) here last week where it was finally decided that the police could not aquire biological samples from the university of Oslo to help in a missing person investigation as the person in question had not agreed to it, so obviously some very influential judges in one civilized country do agree.
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That said, between the I Robot extension, mandatory data collection and the gutting of the extension system Mozilla seems to be on a multi year marathon effort to play all their cards into Googles hands.
Firefox is still my main browser though but to a large degree because the alternatives aren't quite there for me as a power user.
At this stage they seem to be toeing the line for plausible deniability of Google's monopoly, while being thoroughly defanged from doing anything to reduce the actual monopoly.
I am saying I want
- authorities to look into these dealings
- someone to create a (paid?) unborked version of modern Firefox
- or a "vetted" safe version of Pale Moon or something
- Google to be split into number of chunks
Erm... Firefox has told people that they would hand data to law enforcement. They have to! Everyone has to!
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/
> When do we share your information with others?
> When the law requires it. We follow the law whenever we receive requests about you from a government or related to a lawsuit.
So what? The counter argument is that people are being hypocritical with their criticism towards Audacity here.
Why are you okay with some applications collecting telemetry, but not with others?
But wouldn't you agree that HN would go apeshit if Mozilla tried to introduce a "law-enforcement" clause like Audacity did?