If you advertise a browser as being all about privacy, you absolutely should not be a/b testing users without their explicit consent. It is amazing to me that this needs to be said.
If I told you right now that HN is A/B testing the size of the vote arrows, and you see larger ones than I do, how exactly are your privacy rights violated?
On a website, that isn't too much of a problem, because you expect your activity to be tracked since you are interacting with a web server.
In a browser, the same tracking is more intrusive. My behavior on a site is now being sent to the browser author, an unrelated party.
But you're just assuming it is. It could also be "On uninstall and crash, report back which studies were enabled" to track how many people are uninstalling their browser when the flag stupid_feature="on" is set.
Be mad about the data collected [specifically, what type of data is collected], not about the concept of a/b testing. Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable. Otherwise you're fighting an ever-uphiller battle. Because if they want to know which sites you visit and the privacy boundary is "a/b testing isn't acceptable", they'll do it via history syncing instead.
What does this sentence mean? A/B testing fundamentally requires data collection, so I don't understand how to be mad about the data collected but not A/B testing.
Don’t be mad _that_ data is collected, be mad about _what specific_ data is collected.
I don’t know that I agree, but it does help me understand the meaning of the previous post. Thanks!
Of course we are. We didn't consent to being experimented upon or to have our behavior analyzed, so we have no basis for trust.
> Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable
Acceptable depends on trust. Ask for permission, not forgiveness, and I am more inclined to trust. Without that, I assume the worst.
Mozilla has arbitrary code execution rights on your computer the moment you allow them auto-updates. They're also entirely free to ignore your opt-out or opt-in requests.
What is the consequence of this? In the abstract I understand that it doesn’t feel great, but I’m asking in the specific, how does it make a difference to any individual user?
If you knew that the user in the A group made fewer misclicks after the back button was shrunk … how does that harm anyone?
That's not the point. The point is unless you are doing data collection on anything but an opt-in basis, you are not pro-privacy. What you do with the data or why you collect it or if that collection is harmful is irrelevant to this principle.
A _privacy marketed_ browser sending such analytics data back home is different from a regular browser doing so.
* a short list of all the data they could collect, and
* a promise that they won't collect anything else without asking for the user's consent again,
then I doubt anyone would complain.
I may agree with the goals, but that doesn't mean I should blindly trust them to execute them, right?