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Comment by eatbitseveryday | Hacker News Reader

How can this work "for German users"? Why is this not a "for a Firefox user"? I am German - how do I know this is enabled for me? I do not live in Germany.

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From the article:

> Firefox version 120 introduces the cookie banner blocker.

> Enable: By default, it's on in private windows for users in Germany.

That doesn't say how they determine "users in Germany". Dial IP into some service and look at geo location? Sort of pointless if VPN is used?

Oh, I get your point now :-)

It clearly means "up-to-date Firefox instances located in Germany", your nationality doesn't really matter.

Germany was probably chosen because Firefox's market share is fairly high there

The article itself doesn't say that.

> The cookie banner blocker is available starting from Firefox version 120, and it's automatically enabled for users in Germany browsing in Private Browsing Mode.

> ...

> Enable: By default, it's on in private windows for users in Germany.

> ...

> Why Germany and private browsing mode?

> Our initial launch in Germany and private browsing mode has specific reasons:

> - Private browsing mode displays cookie banners repeatedly, making this feature especially useful. Germany, as a part of the European Union, is a prominent market where cookie banners are noticeable due to GDPR.

> - We plan to gather insights from this launch before potentially expanding the feature to a broader audience.

Firefox periodically dials home and reconfigures itself based on the arbitrary whims of Mozilla. It's really kind of disgusting.

And the other browsers don't?

I've had my share of weird issues in Chrome because they enabled an "experiment" of some kind.

Yes, they are all doing it, and it's all bad. Though Firefox is especially culpable since most of their marketing is about privacy. It's apparently only bad when other people are spying on their users.

For those interested, the mothership is: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org

I'm fairly certain the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and it's among the top 10 most blocked addresses in my Pi-Hole.

Frankly, I'm weighing the benefits to cost ratio of just blacklisting all Mozilla domains if this gets worse.

Telemetry and "studies" are both checkboxes in the privacy section of firefox's preferences.

I usually turn both off right after changing the default search engine and disabling search suggestions, when I setup a new install.

Turns out this only turns off some of the telemetry. Turning it off completely is not entirely trivial.

https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...

Mozilla claiming to be the champions of privacy (among other virtues) makes this arguably worse than Google, Microsoft, et al. because they're at least upfront about their telemetry.

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