I’ve had Mozilla developers tell me they have no interest in getting rid of all the phoning home Firefox does, not even as an advanced or hidden config.
I wish they cared as much about privacy at the technical level as they do in their marketing.
I wish they cared as much about privacy at the technical level as they do in their marketing.
As an exmozillian I find this I have to wonder about your reasons for this. From why you think crash reporting, render time, and privacy preserving analytics aren't giving benefits that users prefer, all the way to characterizing MoCo as "a company".
Those aren't the only times FF wants to "phone home". Personally, what made me jump from FF to a fork of the same, is Firefox Suggest. To me, this is a disgusting feature. Firefox with this feature says to me, we, Mozilla, want to become more like Chrome/Google.
It makes me not want to share even the tiniest bit of information with Mozilla.
But if you want to turn it off you can here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest
All of these anti privacy features, default enabled as they are, tells me something about Mozilla. Something you might not even want to think about.
If you're fine with sending to Mozilla everything you type into the address bar, then you probably don't care that much at all about privacy, which would be a shame, because privacy, online and offline, is nothing more and nothing less than a god damn human right.
>> but you can turn it off, doh
99% won't, because they don't know what's the point. Perhaps they're right.
But when they try to develop alternative funding mechanisms like this they also get attacked.
> All of these anti privacy features, default enabled as they are, tells me something about Mozilla. Something you might not even want to think about.
Their goal isn't anti-privacy, it's that they need alternate revenue sources. I'm fine with that.
>>> but you can turn it off, doh
Please don't misquote me. My parent post was polite and informative and to mischaracterise it ("doh") is unnecessary.
That's entirely besides the point.
>> Their goal isn't anti-privacy
That's sad.
>> Please don't misquote me.
Did not mean to but yes, I did and I apologize. Because that was rude of me to do so.
Which is why corporations should not really be able to decide for the 99%. I won't blame Mozilla for trying this in the environment where it's possibly their only way to survive. It's really quite telling Firefox Suggest is only available in the USA.
That ability is opt-in only. By default, Mozilla does not see anything typed in the address bar. One has to manually turn on "Improve the Firefox Suggest experience" in about:preferences. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest?as=u&ut...
I think that preferences are things that people express clearly, and you can either agree to honor them, or refuse to honor them. Or you can change the subject to render time, or to whether a corporation is a company.
You said, "I have a reason to believe that it is a company wanting something beyond what many or most of the users would prefer."
You have not articulated any reason. Just an unsupported conclusion, and then quickly switched to saying that preferences could be ignored. (which clearly your preference is ignored), while then trying to throw a bomb saying that the very real (and documented!) benefits that telemetry provides to all users, aren't actually some distraction.
State the nefarious secret reason you believe Mozilla has rather bland anonymous data, and what threat that identifying a CPU and operating system provides.
And for the record, my quip about Mozilla not being a company, was a facetious remark about how poorly managed Mozilla is, and the fact that was originally a nonprofit, but now has this a very unusual architecture of being for-profit corporation that is wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, due to US tax laws dictating that a minimum percentage of the revenue must come from donation, and the search deals were way out stripping that, and B-corps didn't exist when it was founded.
So, one of the problems with power users is that they not only demand weirdly specific features, but that they all want different features from one another. And they will be very loud about how that particular feature is critical to their workflow. So the net effect is that they overcomplicate software.
Let's say you're a developer and you want to uncomplicate your software. How do you do that? Well, yeah, you could cut features, hide them in a junk-drawer menu, or redesign your UI to guide people to the most common options. But here's the problem: how do you know what the common options even are?
Telemetry.
You put in something in your software that counts up how many times users actually use each feature, and then it pings your server with the counts. You count how many active installations there are and bam, you get the data you need.
Then you release your fancy new redesign only to get assaulted with all sorts of abuse that could only be charitably described as "negative criticism". Oh my god, how could they have removed the "heat CPU when spacebar is pressed" feature!? They have telemetry, don't they know how many times I hit the spacebar?! Everyone else is just happy the app no longer flattens their battery, but the power users shout over them.
If you're a power user, telemetry has zero upside for you. Why the hell would you want the 7zip developers to know that you're the only person who has ever used the "Compress directory and e-mail" shell extension? You don't want the software to be easier to use! You already know how to use it, and screw anyone else who doesn't!
"Professional" software runs the risk of accumulating garbage in their designs and interfaces for exactly this reason. This goes for everything from Photoshop to git to MySQL.
(And yes, there's totally an inverse of this where the developer rounds off all the edges to the point where the software is more useful as a practical demonstration of gaslighting than an actual app.)
This might sound crazy, but bear with me: have about simply using the software you write?
No matter the benefit to the user or the company, telemetry should be opt-in. If the user doesn't opt-in, then all the potential upsides don't matter.
I would take your claims more seriously, if you could speak to something concrete about deficiencies of what is collected, and how, and what steps were taken to anonymize the data, how it's retained. (Fun fact: You can! It's all documented.), and articulate something beyond, "I just don't wanna, and I think my minority opinion should be imposed on everyone."
That should tell you something, then.
> (Fun fact: You can! It's all documented.), or articulate something beyond, "I just don't wanna, and I think my minority opinion should be imposed on everyone."
It's actually that I want Mozilla and the developers there to respect my fundamental human rights as a data subject. The idea that you think I should have to justify my rights to you is absurd.
I honestly don't think you understand the damage that your attitude and your comments are doing to Firefox. Why would anyone ever trust software written by someone with your attitude. It's abhorrent.
If the information at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid is correct, then it seems that this data collection may be unlawful for EU residents.
Even IP address, even if never stored, is too much telemetry to be collected without consent or other lawful basis, which doesn't seem to be present.
It's sad to see Mozilla throw away their reputation because of telemetry.
> That should tell you something, then.
Yeah. People are lazy. Humanity has known that for thousands of years.
> Even IP address, even if never stored, is too much telemetry to be collected without consent or other lawful basis, which doesn't seem to be present.
Go home dude. You clearly have no idea how the internet works.
What a disgusting attitude to hold. It should tell you that usera don't want to share telemetry and that decision should be respected. I'm very thankful I live in a jurisdiction that protects me and the public from people like you.
> Go home dude. You clearly have no idea how the internet works.
It's clear you don't understand the regulatory environment that browsers operate in. Hopefully you are not representative of the developers in Mozilla. Otherwise, it's time to jump ship to Librewolf or another privacy-conscious fork.
If you think your local regulatory environment prevents anything you're upset about, you need to learn about your regulations, because everything I've said is completely GDPR compliant, Which as far as I know, is the strictest law about data collection out there.
All the GDPR says is that you setup data retention controller (a person responsible for data retention and limit access of personally identifiable information. If you can articulate a "legitimate interest", and take steps mitigate access (which can include access control lists, data anonymization, data aggregation, and/or data retention policies), then you're fine. If the data is does not have PII, it literally doesn't matter. I say this as someone that has conducted multiple GDPR compliance audits, at multiple companies.
So to use your telemetry example. While your IP address is PII, and it would be recorded in an access log (along with all requests) up to n days, before being purged, your software information and stack trace information could be stored indefinitely because there is no way to link a stack trace to literally anyone.
> It's clear you don't understand the regulatory environment that browsers operate in.
I already addressed that, but more importantly, I know that you can't get a response from any machine using Internet Protocol without sending your IP address, because it must be provided so the so the response can be sent to back to you. This means that your IP address will always be as you put it "collected" even if it is "not stored" -- even in an http access log (Which, by the way is a legitimate interest for security and debugging reasons.)
You can't articulate an hypothetical threat to an individual from nonPII information, nor explain how anonymization is insufficient protection, nor do you understand the legal or technical requirements involved.
And to cap it off, if you've actually looked at Librewolf. You'd know it makes request to Mozilla all the time (with your IP address! Without your explicit approval! By default!) to download tracking protection data. In fact, Librewolf strongly recommends leaving this on as it increases security and privacy.
That is why I dismiss you.
Just like everything else, if you don't pay for it then you are the product. It would be different if Firefox was funded by donations, but it is a for profit company that gets basically all its money from selling users to Google.
I really find it hard believe that
SELECT country, COUNT(*) FROM search_log GROUP BY country
is an invasion of privacy, or that somehow getting a commission off of the data you're already providing to a third party, is somehow making a user more of a product, than they already are.
Also, since they are funded by ads it means that they can't make ad blocking as a default feature, since then those users wouldn't be worth anything to sell. Whether you like it or not Firefox isn't free from any of this control.
Why not pay roughly in proportion to the revenue you get from Firefox users searching?
Where are you getting your information, because I don't believe this true from my conversations with Firefox developers and data scientists. I think Firefox sends a ping to Google along with a telemetry ping to Mozilla, and then both Mozilla and Google correlate / fight over data as part of the contractual negotiations.
But I also don't believe that personal data Google collect will be used nefariously. I have yet to find a story that proves Google untrustworthy of my data. I consider personalized ads an annoyance (and I block them), but not a significant threat to my privacy, after all, they are shown to no one but me.
Same thing for Windows 10 telemetry.
As you can see, I am rather trusting of big tech, but because I am trusting, I am not going to choose Firefox for privacy reasons. I actually use half Firefox, half Chrome, but privacy has nothing to do with it.
Now, if I was less trusting, enough not to want to share my data with Google and Microsoft, then why would I trust Firefox? I wouldn't want any data to leave my computer unless I explicitly allowed it. Firefox has questionable management and has Google as its biggest partner, enough for the paranoid me to raise concerns. And one thing for sure, with telemetry, if I really had "something to hide" (ex: criminal activity), I wouldn't use Firefox as is.
- Who tells you that Mozilla won't do it?
- Criminal should know better than to use Chrome and Firefox, at least not without additional protection, and it includes disabling telemetry in both products.
I am not saying that Google can't do anything bad to me, I just trust that they won't. Answering the other comment about Nest camera, I didn't see any example of Google actually handing out data to police without a warrant, they are just saying that they can. I already know that they can, what I want to know is what they did. I also have no real reason to fear Mozilla, and I left telemetry enabled.
But I think that if you really want people to take your commitment to privacy seriously, "I collect data but trust me, I won't do anything bad" is not enough, I want that of course, but I also want technical commitment, and telemetry that is not strictly opt-in is a big no.
For me, vanilla Firefox is not a privacy-focused browser (and neither are Chrome and Edge). For me the criteria is: would I use it to commit a serious crime? If the answer is "no", it is not private. It is not that I want to commit a crime, or that privacy=crime, but that's like a litmus test. In fact I didn't even look into it but TOR browser comes to mind, it is based on Firefox, but of course, telemetry has been removed.
https://petapixel.com/2022/07/27/googles-nest-will-provide-d... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250470
The funny thing is that I started using Firefox because of extensions.... and they basically blocked extensions on Firefox mobile... I know that you can make collections, but they made it as painful as possible.
That being said, being upset Mozilla has a trash telemetry policy isn't a good excuse to use Chrome, a willfully compromised browser which has refused to implement industry-standard protections.