Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, I bet that a significant majority of the users that turn on the AI kill switch — which must have some kind of phone-home telematics attached — will also be users who have disabled Firefox metrics collection and so will not have their opinion counted.

So, the most effective path here for y’all to be heard is not flipping the switch off yourself (do so anyways!) — anyone who cares at this stage has probably opted out of being counted already, after all — but instead to ensure that news of this switch spreads to absolutely as many non-tech people as possible. Don’t argue that they should run some script that shuts off their metrics and phone home and updates. Just convince them to shut off the AI and explain that this is why their browser got slow about a year ago! They’ll flip off the switch gleefully, their phone-home will count them, and y’all will have the strongest possible impact on the telematics graphs at Mozilla.

I already ran the disable process manually on the computers I have friends and family IT duties towards, so I’ll go back and do the AI switch to be sure it’s counted next week. Yes, this is a crap way to be heard. But making a mark on feature opt-out graphs is probably the only hope we have left to get their executive leadership to stop drowning the browser for its own good.

The other thing people can do is install Firefox and use it. An uptick in user share also serves as a metric to reinforce the move. Let's be honest, most people complaining are using chrome or some flavor.

But current Firefox users could probably temporarily turn on telemetry, activate the kill switch, and turn telemetry back off. Just make sure you wait long enough to ensure the information is sent

They should get the best metrics out of update server communications anyhow, 30% or more users getting update downloads than having AI enabled should be obvious.

I've read this three times now and still don't understand you. Do you think people don't update their software? Are you just counting every update as people happy about the kill switch?

There'll be so much noise in that signal it'll be almost useless. You can't differentiate it from anything else. For all anyone knows it happened because the word Firefox was in the top story on hacker news

Approximately all people update Firefox so you don't need telemetry to count "AI disabled" installations, instead you can derive it as "updates requested" minus "AI enabled".

But the AI and telemetry toggles aren't coupled. While we can assume that users who disable telemetry are more likely to have AI disabled as well this still isn't translating to user numbers.

Hm. I don't think I follow "isn't translating to user numbers", could you elaborate?

Here's my thinking: There's 100 users getting updates. There's 40 users sending telemetry with AI enabled There's 10 users sending telemetry with AI disabled

So we have 50 people not sending telemetry and using or not using AI. If we assume more likely but not overwhelmingly more it's 30 people.

So we end up with 40+20 with AI, and 10+30 without?

This correlation may be ilegal to do in large parts of the world.

When you disable telemetry you are declaring you don't want to be tracked.

If you attach tracking to get exact set numbers it'd be illegal, but taking an aggregate and doing statistics shouldn't be since it can't be traced to individuals.

I assumed that AI features require server, so the server knows how many users it has. If some features are local then it's not so straightforward.

that's.... really clever

I can think if some mac users I know who deny all updates from being burned by feature creep and breakages in the past.

If my choice is between a single blatant signal of hostility to AI that can’t be misunderstood, and hoping that a pro-AI company’s executives invested in voluntarily correlating two different sets of logs to prove itself wrong, then I’m taking door number one.

Agreed, but we have laws about PII in so many places so this is what we'll probably get.

Still, AI services cost money they probably want to check usage since money talks.

> will also be users who have disabled Firefox metrics collection and so will not have their opinion counted.

Gee. If only there was a way to collect users opinions on things. Welp.. guess we have to live with subtly spying on everything they do with our software.

If we replaced telemetry with some sort of survey emails and phone calls, we'd get exactly another 500-thread discussion on HN about how "Mozilla is collecting emails to sell to the highest bidder!", "Mozilla is sending us spam!" and whatnot.

Most people aren't vocal.

Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users.

Many vocal people aren't even users.

Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.

If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today. Unfortunately most evils are created from good intentions. I hear there's an entire road paved that way

Also, people lie. I don't trust what random users tell me, because years of tech support taught me that they're lying.

If you go into a survey expecting lies, don't expect people to be excited over taking them when you do nothing with them.

> but you're acting like it's easy to get that information.

It is, relatively speaking.

> You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys.

Surveys without proper response and adjustments aren't passing feedback, it's political theatre. People groan about surveys because it takes time and rarely shows results reflectant of the responses.

We know the system is broken. Hard to shame us into thinking we're the ones who broke it.

> You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.

You act like statisticians don't spend half their field accounting around bias.

>we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today.

Let's have the old evils dealt with before worrying about creating new evils who happen to do the exact same thing as the "old evils" (spoilers: they are the same picture).

Mainly it's just developers not wanting to hear what people say.

People who aren't vocal tend not to care very much. People aren't vocal tend to just accept whatever happens to them. So why not cater to the people who are vocal?

I think at this point they know all these opinions pretty well, but they simply don't care or see better growth options by targeting users who don't belong to that particular bubble. They see OpenAI approaching the same active user counts as Facebook and they want a slice of that pie. And the majority of that pie is non-techies.

Yup. When people feel like their voice won't matter, they will simply shut off any channels "listening" to them. You need to build up trust first.

As a complete contrast, there's a lot more enthusiasm over Valve surveys.

Arguing that telemetry is wrong doesn’t seem to have stopped Firefox from using it. If your fight against telemetry is a higher priority than your fight against AI in the browser, good luck and more power to you! I’m just making sure no one makes that decision by accident.

This isn’t about a fight between two things. This is about a company that completely refuses to listen to their users and then some random guy on the Internet who says you should deal with their telemetry to somehow fix the problem that in no way relates to the actual problem and no way has evidence that they would take steps to fix the problem either. It’s very prosocial to think that Firefox actually makes changes based on user feedback, but almost none of these features have users been clamoring for, this is totally executive bullshit pushed into the product.

> It’s very prosocial to think that Firefox actually makes changes based on user feedback

Nope, just hopeful, for me anyways. I already intend to migrate friends & family away from it next year, because from a prosocial standpoint they’re going to be more miserable over time as that sub-2% market share starts breaking banking and government sites, and whatever nostalgia I have for olde Firefox has no place in what’s best for those who depend on me. Regardless, I’m still hopeful that somehow concrete numbers might dissuade Firefox from being daft, or I wouldn’t have bothered commenting on this post at all! If they get the memo, then everyone I’m being prosocial towards benefits, and we all get to invest our limited time and energy into something more interesting and useful for the world than switching browsers.

(Yes, I recognize this is an unlikely outcome, no need to try to shoot my hopes out of the sky like a clay pigeon, I’m well aware that their wings are made of melting wax, etc, etc.)

For anyone motivated to do this the number of installs will be vanishingly small.

They'll just push an update that prompts users to re-enable AI until their metrics have reached the relevant manager's targets.

Telemetry was never about user preferences but all about justifying what you were going to do anyway.

The best thing about Firefox telemetry is that it can't be easily disabled. There are many setting that control it. Including an external scheduled task that can't be disabled using Firefox itself. And even if you delete the task it will come back after update.

You wouldn’t know it from how often scripts claiming to disable telemetry hit the front page.

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