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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Let's stop making privacy a techie-only thing, though. This should be a question a user chooses the first time they boot the browser, and Firefox should do its hardest to honor it.

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Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

> Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

How can you tell?

It's open-source software.

That means nothing. Go read the audacity threads pertaining to trying to sneak in Google and some Russian analytics clients.

From the latest Audacity release notes:

>A journaling feature has been added for QA purposes.

What exactly does that mean?

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

That's not what I meant. Search the PRs for the most commented upon PR. It'll invariably be the one about adding Google analytics and telemetry to Audacity.

In Firefox:

point your url bar to about:telemetry

It shows you all the data that has been gathered. (Though IIRC it might still show stuff even when you've disabled telemetry -- in that case the data is being aggregated locally but not sent.)

Go to https://telemetry.mozilla.org

To look at the data on the server side. There are more sophisticated ways of querying it, but obviously not everybody can just be handed access to run arbitrary analysis code.

Probe dictionaries:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

You forgot safe browsing.

What about it?

How you probably think it works in Firefox and how it actually works in Firefox are two different things, by the way:

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

As soon as i start firefox on windows it connnects to 1e100.net and makes a lot of connection to this domain even when no page is displayed (just the start screen). This is another reason why i'm in the process of switching from Firefox to another browser. A program shall not initiate network connections if not asked to.

Just checked about:telemetry, it seems most data are about CPU and memory stats, nothing related to browsing history.

Mozilla doesn't collect browsing history, period.

I suspect that for every scenario you can think of someone will be able to reply with solid logic about how it could be used in a way that’s bad and/or privacy-violating.

But is though IF it's not up front and center shown to the user. All telemetry can be backtracked to an IP in most cases. That's a bad thing. It's a form of history. It should be a switch that turns ON so that you OPT IN. Not the reverse, nor should it involve having to change a hosts entry.

What is privacy really? The browser? The ISP gets your data, the site gets metrics, and VPNs will just redirect traffic.

Having control over which information about yourself, your life, your habits, etc. you choose to give out, when, for how long, and to whom.

It's not this convoluted. Give people their privacy.

I’m not anti privacy, it just means something different to everyone. If you don’t control the metadata for servers you use, does that mean you cannot ever expect privacy?

I argued with someone about how we shouldn’t expect privacy with a cell phone, I don’t see how a 24/7 location tracking device that reads data telemetry (even if you use a custom privacy rom you connect to the towers and send telemetry) can ever be seen as private. PCs are usually compromised with Intel ME or AMD ST (unless you have a specially modded one or use old government contracted ones with them disabled).

Not having to use servers at all is kind of a preference. Why do browsers need to phone home at all?

When you use a site, you’re using servers and they have logs. This is unrelated to the browser itself, although ideally it shouldn’t have telemetry. But even so the servers of sites you use will and you can’t control the data collection.

When I boot Firefox, that operation should not automatically connect to a server unless I have a default web page set.

Maybe I am opening a local file? Using a local network resource? On a limited/expensive connection and don't want it auto-updating some BS? Running the browser in kiosk mode as a glorified HTML/CSS/JS GUI for a local app (apparently a thing now)?

It's really apparent when I socks proxy into a remote site (via limited 2G) to view a few kB worth of HTML admin page and firefox starts autoupdating a bunch of remote resources.

> The ISP gets your data

Browsers know much more. Most channels are encrypted nowadays so ISP doesn't know what you talk about on internets.

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