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Comment by atomicfiredoll | Hacker News Reader

Just a shortcut for anybody trying to find it.

"Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide [0] on how to adjust your settings."

---

1. Click the [hamburger menu button] and select Settings.

2. Select the Privacy & Security panel.

3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.

4. Check or uncheck the box next to Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...

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That still doesn't disable all telemetry from being sent. There's a whole slue of settings that you need to change in about:config and then there's still no guarantee.

Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.

Could you tell us what other settings you need to change please?

It's a bit deceptive to claim you have a Privacy First policy when it's opt out. True privacy is not opt out, but opt in.

Anonymization isn't opt out.

Anonymization is also weak sauce.

I wonder if you'll have to remember to do this after each update, like you have to do for most of Chrome's unwanted and unwelcomed features.

Probably not. These settings have been around for a long time already anyway, and they never get overwritten once set, at least in my experience.

When you haven't used Firefox for a while it shows a prompt that tricks you into resetting your profile.

They already did this way back with their other telemetry stuff. You had to disable it through about:config and then Mozilla introduced new flags/renamed them and even added a flag if you have disabled telemetry that you had to disable again manually.

It might be possible to disable this feature through a policy file [1] just like other features can be disabled, e.g. here's how to disable auto-update:

   {
   "policies": 
      {
        "DisableAppUpdate": true
       }
   }

Create a text file named policies.json in a directory named distribution inside the Firefox installation directory. In my case that ends up looking like this:

   /opt/APPfirefox (package root)
   /opt/APPfirefox/firefox (currrent nightly)
   /opt/APPfirefox/bin/firefox-127.0a1 -> /opt/APPfirefox/firefox/firefox-127.0a1
   /opt/APPfirefox/distribution/policies.json

The browser sees this file and abides by its contents. Open about:policies#documentation in Firefox to see which policies can be configured this way.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

Apparently not, at least for this update.

I had the settings disabled, then updated to the latest version ("126.0 (64-bit)") and settings were kept disabled.

So at least for now it looks like it respects your current settings.

Only time will tell, but I don't think I've ever had that issue with Firefox so far.

thanks for sharing - just found out you have to do this for each firefox profile if you have more than one.

Note says it takes 30 days for them to remove your data history.

I wonder if pihole or similar could just block the dns for this crap.

How could they remove your data if it's anonymized? That implies they're using pseudonymization instead.

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