[tialaramex]

Have a look through about:telemetry and let us know what you think the US government thinks is so valuable they would threaten powerful people with jail time to find out. Whether my CPU has MMX? Maybe times so far in this session there was auto-starting audio playback which you allowed even though Firefox defaults to never allowing this?

I can /maybe/ if I squint really hard, imagine some murder detective figuring out a way that a value in their suspect's telemetry data helps prove they did it. Only thing is, the murder cop can just ask a judge to let them go take the suspect's whole PC, no need to bother any Mozilla employees with crazy requests.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

You are aware that it is publicly known that the US government has been practicing a "collect anything you can get your hands on about everyone" approach for a while now, right?

[tialaramex]

So your theory is that the US government's policy is to find the most convoluted difficult way to do this collecting and ignore all the easier ways?

"Boss, I just got done with that $500Bn compute job to work out a guy's password as you recommended, rather than just resetting it by email as I'd originally thought of doing. As you pointed out the government can just raise income taxes to pay for it"

"Cool, OK, now I want you to go threaten this company CEO. They collect optional telemetry data and we'd like to extort that CEO into telling us whether a user with this IP address has an Intel or AMD processor"

"Shouldn't I just get them to export the data from their software directly rather than bother with all this? Or just use any of these broadly available malware techniques to get the answer for the user we care about?"

"No, that would be simpler and cheaper, if we do it this way only a true genius like zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC would realise what we're up to, as ever our goal is collect anything but only in the most elaborate way possible so that it's tremendously expensive and difficult"

"OK, but what if the user has disabled telemetry?"

"Then we'll have to think of an even more expensive and elaborate way to collect data. We have a programme to teach goldfish to swim differently depending on whether they have recently seen anybody wearing a T-shirt with a specific logo design on it."