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Comment by sce | Hacker News Reader

> I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry.

I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.

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> I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves.

Go to about:telemetry

There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.

Also https://telemetry.mozilla.org

I didn't know this existed - thank you for sharing. I've shared telemetry on Firefox, but wasn't sure exactly what was being sent so this helps quite a bit more.

That gave me a laugh. Had no idea this existed, thanks.

For those who may be curious, Firefox still lists all their metapages [0], which makes exploring under the hood pretty easy.

[0] about:about

I don't think it lists 100% of them. For example, I think there might be one that forces a crash for debugging purposes? There are definitely some that are used for displaying errors and things (eg about:httpsonlyerror).

You could probably find more with searchfox, using a better query than https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=about%3A&path...

> About About

> This is a list of “about” pages for your convenience.

> Some of them might be confusing. Some are for diagnostic purposes only.

> And some are omitted because they require query strings.

Some are omitted. Like about:blank.

Windows is doing well in this regard in that 11 (and some earlier versions of 10) includes a 'View diagnostic data' button in settings that starts duplicating shipped-off telemetry to the local disk for inspection.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...

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