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Comment by viscousviolin | Hacker News Reader

Oh interesting! Seems like a pretty specific requirement to have. Do you mind if I ask what you use those for?

As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage. It's not 100% effective, but if them making an effort to do the right thing pushes you away, you might be asking too much unfortunately. Building an entire browser takes a lot of energy and time, and Firefox seems like the kind of browser that's worth it in the long term.

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"Do you mind if I ask what you use those for?"

Game engine.

"As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage"

And the thing is, that firefox itself is tracking you and sends that data home. Maybe look up what "studies" mean. But so far at least you can opt out of it, unlike with chrome.

Ah, I see what you mean. I'm personally not against this at all, since the Firefox devs need feedback on what's working and what isn't. But I completely understand that some people won't accept this. Only thing I can't figure out is if this is opt-out or opt-in, because I might have mindlessly clicked yes on opting in during installation.

What you mean is telemetry, that is something seperately. And it is also enabled by default( and also annoys me, but less so).

But firefox studies means, (or can mean), that firefox will track you and sell that data to ad companies, if you "allow" it. Which everyone does, by default. This behavior from a "privacy orientated" company is close to a scam by me. Because a normal user who believes the privacy promise, won't know of, nor find these settings.

And apparently now there is a third setting(on Firefox mobile, but not on desktop), that at least openly tells you they share tracking data with a ad companies.

edit: ok, that is weirdly funny. "Adjust" the ad company firefox is apparently working together with, has a website, that does not really load in firefox at all, but only in chrome

https://www.adjust.com/

Selling data would be a bad move for sure. I can't seem to find anything when I search for it, do you maybe have a source I could take a look at?

If you have FF on mobile, take a look in the settings and look at "data collection" (or something alike, I have it as "Datenerhebung" in german")

There is a switch with "marketing data".

And as far as I understood, this thing came out of "Firefox studies". They branded it as experiments, but I have not seen a experiment not related to tracking. Most famously the Mr.Robo scandal, but that only gained visibility, because it was visible. Others just ran in the background. But you should be able to look, what kind of "studies" did run on your computer.

If you want the opt-out version of Fx, there’s LibreWolf & Mullvad.

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