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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

Install a new version of firefox, have a look in settings under "data" (or whatever they call it in english). There you will see "studies" as activated, which is cryptic talk for ad tracking. And more recently, literal tracking for a advertisement company.

And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me.

(and paid ads you have on the home screen)

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Studies are not ad tracking. It's worse and more like a backdoor for A/B testing of browser features. A few years back an update broke the Metamask extension and it was fixed by pushing via studies. At that point users weren't very aware the feature even existed and it caused some backlash since users realized there was a backdoor to push code into their browsers.

The backlash resulted in studies being opt-in, and I thought it still was but I don't know, I use "policies.json" to setup my browsers.

Am I being a total chud? These don't really seem egregious? I already accept (and expect) that Firefox receives background updates in the background.

https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png

https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png

https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png

I don't mind the feature as opt-in, just like telemetry it can be useful. But depending on the threat model it can be a big problem. I still use Firefox as my main browser.

> And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me.

Ouch, they were new to me and also activated.

Yep, stuff like this makes me question many things. I mean in a sane world this should be enough to sue them into oblivion. But the general bar in that regard is so low, that apparently even open source companies can do it as default.

Why don’t you think it’s a sane enough world to “sue them into oblivion”?

Because I do not think one will have success with it. Same with Microsoft, Google and co.

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