Mozilla removes telemetry service Adjust from mobile Firefox versions | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla removes telemetry service Adjust from mobile Firefox versions

techzine.eu

43 pointsReadCarlBarks32 comments

> Mozilla watcher Sören Hentzschel points out [1] that the release notes do not indicate that this service collects data. This means that end users were not aware that the service was forwarding data to Mozilla, which is remarkable for a browser provider that claims to value (data) privacy.

I don't think the second sentence can/should be inferred from the first. Just the fact that the removal isn't called out in the release notes, doesn't mean that users weren't informed about it when it was present.

There's probably something to be said about whether it was mentioned clearly enough (and on whether it should have been present in the first place), but the release notes of a future version is not where I'd expect to find information about data collection.

(I work for Mozilla, but not on Firefox and wasn't involved with this.)

[1] https://www.soeren-hentzschel.at/firefox-android/mozilla-ent...

It's a complete mistranslation of what Sören wrote. He just noted the missing change log entry, as you said.

Lots of movement around Firefox lately.

The possibility of the google money going away as a result of the antitrust ruling must be really shaking them to the core over at Mozilla.

> possibility of the google money going away

That Mozilla seems to actually give a shit about something for the first time in decades speaks volumes to how anticompetitive that deal was.

Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.

Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft. Without Google bidding up the price, doubtful they would pay as much for Bing to be the default search and it’s not like Firefox users would welcome that change.

Free software doesn’t work for long without some sort of corporate sponsorship at some point, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to fund it at this point. (And don’t say “the EU should” most Europeans are not clamoring for their governments to spend money on an American browser company with web compatibility issues that no one tests against)

The problem with Mozzilla is that they don’t just fund development, they have control of it and they receive almost all funding from a direct competitor with a horrible privacy record.

I trust FSF, Debian, Linux Foundation, etc. not to violate my privacy. Clearly the same cannot be said for Mozilla.

'clamoring' No, they're most certainly not.

And I'm more than willing to believe the legal difficulties of the foundation would be a nightmare, but would an EU sponsored fork of some kind be such a terrible idea? A move of headquarters to a suitable city and so on.

Remove the tracking, maybe even a few mandates to offer it up in certain settings that receive EU funding already.

An interesting idea even if sadly unlikely.

When you say “fund us” do you mean Mozilla or Firefox development? Because it seems like these haven’t been equivalent for a while now.

> Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.

There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.

I agree that Free software needs sponsorship, especially when it is such a fundamental part of interacting with a computer (which a web browser certainly is).

I am not certain that this sponsorship coming from a company that wants to undermine it is a good thing.

> There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.

I think building a browser is quite a bit more complicated than building a Linux distro. More akin to building an OS to compete with the big 3.

There is a good book on how non profits are terribly handicapped by the current system: https://www.amazon.com/Uncharitable-Restraints-Nonprofits-Un...

> Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft.

Doesn't Apple have that kind of money in a big vault that Tim Apple gets to do his Scrooge McDuck impersonation into?

I'm out of the loop here, can someone explain?

All of the funding for Firefox (or nearly all?) comes from Google. There is no way for you as a private person to donate money to firefox development. That of course means that Mozilla needs to keep its large donner happy lest the money go away.

On top of that, the recent google monopoly ruling means that most likely Google cannot continue to donate the massive chunk of change yearly to firefox that they have been. That could mean the death of firefox.

Oh wow, how have I not heard of this? I assume Firefox can still strike some deal for revenue sharing of people who choose to use Google on Firefox, though? Or was the money purely for having Google be the default?

The money was for setting the default.

Oof, RIP Firefox...

So Firefox had spyware all this time in their iOS and Android apps? Not a surprise here despite them being 80% dependent on Google's money, they could not help introduce spyware in their browser and preach 'privacy-first'.

They were never a 'privacy-first browser' after taking Google's money and refusing to remove their dependence from them.

Of course they were never a 'privacy-first browser', it was always clear for anyone who paid attention. They just looked around one day, noticed that every single competitor was atrocious at privacy when compared with Firefox and incorporated that into their marketing messaging and further development plans - which only happened fairly recently.

(2024) Question: Is it "true" that company's may use a link-shortener-service and within a link they send you, hiding their ruling that you have automatically accepted their tracking-"cookie-policy" (for example in agreeing their TOS before)?

Sry, non native english speaker... regards

Personally, I'll judge how worried they are about money by how much the CEO's pay changes. Constantly acting like they're about to be on the rocks when their CEO is taking home almost $7m in compensation per year is laughable, especially considering they made less than $1m for much of Mozilla's lifetime, and their raise to $2m made headlines not that many years ago.

And they fired the engineers who were actually working on the product. $7m is a nice product team that many startups would kill for.

Fire the CEO. Drop all but 2/3 products. Get off the pot.

Speaking of mobile Firefox, they're pursuing this abomination of a UI update for Android too: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/updates-to-androi...

I really wish librewolf would make a version of the firefox beta android apk...

Every large non-profit in the tech/software space eventually becomes a non-profit that happens to do software, rather than a software organization incorporated as a non-profit. Wikimedia, Mozilla, Canonical, etc.

I don't think Canonical ever was a non-profit.

It’s really disappointing that they even had this, and is a perfect example of Mozilla selling out users to Google, as if it weren’t obvious before.

Really no reason to use Firefox over Chromium or Safari as far as I can see.

I’ve had good luck with Orion on mobile.

I use Firefox primarily to support an independent rendering engine. I also like the extensions offered by Firefox more than any other browser. But I would love to see a better managed, user focused fork of it. Time will tell, but for now I am using Firefox until a better alternative comes along.

The rendering engine portion of the whole Firefox vs Chrome debate gets way more attention than it should. It’s really not that important. Someone could fork any piece of the chromium project and have an “independent rendering engine/browser” without all the problems gecko has from a decade of little market share and under investment. Google nor Mozilla make money from their rendering engines as is evidenced by their ability to make money on iOS.

Also, the rendering engine isn’t the way Google is being anticompetitive or violating users privacy, just like no one is really that worried that Google, Facebook, and MS are some of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel. People use a chromium based browser because chromium is better. Google gets people to use Chrome, and gets their data through the code they add on top. Overall though, Google has not been a bad steward of Blink.

I respectfully disagree as I think the independant rendering engine doesn't get enough attention. But we all ahve our own priorities.

I also do not feel like Chromium/Blink is really superior. But again, different priorities.

Weirdly enough, Blink is the first time we have the equivalent of a shared "OS API", that's due to the browser becoming the main way to run apps (desktop at least) and that is supported by most consumer computing devices

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