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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

Version 92[1] got one step closer. Extrapolating current trends, I shudder to think what will be in version 99.

> Firefox will send Mozilla search queries (what you are typing into the address bar), and city-level location (what's nearby and relevant, determined from your IP address). Firefox also informs the service if you click on a provided suggestion.

Combine this with "studies" which were never made public, extra avenues of telemetry that one finds out about waaaayyy after the fact etc, the last couple of years have seen Firefox become increasingly hostile to users.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir...

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That's not key-logging. That's search suggestions. If you find the privacy implications of search suggestions damning, you've always been able to turn them off.

I don't like that level of telemetry, and I also dislike the "studies" and some of the other things they've pulled, but glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging" is disingenuous at best. It seems to imply that there's some nefarious logging happening that people aren't familiar with and can't disable.

> referring to search suggestions as "key-logging" is disingenuous at best.

Most regular users think you search for something on Google, it is between them and Google. This "feature" started sending one's incomplete queries to Mozilla as well. Every time user presses a key, search suggestions update, meaning every key user presses is sent to Mozilla before the search is even executed on Google.

Upon upgrade, users where not asked "We would like to see every key you press while typing anything in the search bar. Do you give us permission?"

> glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging"

Yeah, I think I am going to keep glibly referring to sending every key-stroke to Mozilla while the user is constructing a search query or looking for a bookmark or a page in their browser history as "key-logging."

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