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Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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