[bwat49]

It wasn't supposed to be visible on the addons page

[mark-r]

I don't think that makes it better. Knowing that there's a way to get an addon installed invisibly is going to be more justification for paranoia.

[dahart]

There almost certainly is not a way to invisibly install add-ons, unless you are part of Mozilla, and, you know, making Firefox. If paranoia is your thing, it might be worth considering that Mozilla can do anything it wants inside Firefox core, all of it is "invisible" to you.

[kuschku]

And this is the point where even the most Mozilla-supporting users move away. For me, this is it, I’m going to Chromium.

Fuck this shit, in the past months we had CliqZ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708, we had Mozilla adding new telemetry, we had Mozilla force-enable toolkit.telemetry.enabled, we had Mozilla say that, if you download Nightly, that is considered opt-in to tracking, we had Mozilla put Google Analytics into the Addons menu (because it’s loaded from addons.mozilla.org: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785 ), and we had Mozilla say that, if we don’t trust Google, we shouldn’t use Firefox.

Fuck this.

[programd]

Regarding telemetry, take a look at the settings in about:config. There are several toolkit.telemetry.Ping settings which are set to true by default. In the spirit of charity I'm going to assume that those phone home pings - on startup, shutdown, update - are not enabled unless telemetry is enabled. But I have not checked...

[bigbugbag]

Alternatively you can give waterfox[1] a try.

Features

    Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
    Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
    Removed Pocket
    Removed Telemetry
    Removed data collection
    Removed startup profiling
    Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
    Allow running of unsigned extensions
    Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
    Addition of Duplicate Tab option
    Locale selector in about:preferences > General

[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

[Danihan]

Great points, thanks for compiling these..

I was using firefox because I don't trust google. ;(

[bo1024]

Yes and a big part of this entire issue is users deciding whether we can trust Mozilla with that power or not.

[Sylos]

And he's saying that this occurence should have no effect on this decision, not in any rational mind.

[bwat49]

You can disable these studies under Options | Privacy and Security

[_red]

I hate the fact that Firefox increasingly makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to find all the hidden options to turn off their various spyware attempts. Its the Win10 of browsers...

[bigbugbag]

There's an extension for that called privacy settings[1] it exposes all the settings in one easy place.

I also recommend waterfox instead of firefox.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-setti... [2]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

[teddyfrozevelt]

Going through your browser settings really is quite the hoop.

[_red]

Yeah, its so intuitive for the average person to type: about:config in address bar and scroll through hundreds of oddly named parameters to turn off spyware.

Comments like yours are illustrative of a certain mindset. When you encounter the complexity of domains you are not intimately familiar with (court system, law, finance, etc), and those complexities are designed specifically to make it hard for you to protect yourself, I'm sure you are just as understanding as you are now.

[bwat49]

You're being hyperbolic, you don't need to go into about:config.

It's right in the main browser settings, under the Privacy and Security section where one would expect settings like this to be

[mynewtb]

How are you supposed to do turn the defaults to a reasonable level of privacy without launching Firefox once though?

[takeda]

I remember it was asking if I want participate in studies when I installed FF for the first time.

[linkmotif]

It is.

[falava]

You should opt in, not opt out

[arprocter]

Preferences/Options -> Privacy and Security -> Allow Firefox to install and run studies

[zzzeek]

that would be worse

[Sylos]

How exactly? Whether they push out code to you by just changing the binary or by installing an extension makes no difference. In fact, pushing it out as an extension, means they actually have less control over your browser, because are bound to the restrictions that extensions have.

Every browser vendor has this control over you when you use their browser. Some have even more, because they don't even need to tell you about it when they're closed-source.