Mozilla people - this is a serious issue. If you want to champion privacy, you NEED to have a big red button that says "nothing gets sent out" and you NEED to have an end-to-end test to make sure Firefox respects it.
Why? Like, seriously. Telemetry is useful, and I am more than happy to provide them with some useful metrics so they know what to improve on - since I can’t really help with the code itself, since it is an insanely huge project.
It’s not like they use it to build a profile of you, as goddamn chrome does.
I feel that whatever Mozilla does can never be good enough for some people, even though they are one of the most important players in the “fight” of OSS. Just think about it, linux is only usable as a desktop OS because most of the desktop apps migrated to the web - and firefox is the only free browser that is actually capable, as well as the only engine that is not google-controlled. We should support them as much as we can.
It annoys me that Mozilla and Firefox are held to an almost impossible standard by this community, whereas others get a pass on behaviour that's far more intrusive. These posts seem to be lacking entirely in perspective. That doesn't mean that Mozilla can't be criticised, but ffs, don't blow minor issues out of proportion.
Software that sends surveillance data of user activity without first obtaining the user’s consent is malware, silently acting against the wishes of the user, co-opting their hardware and network to work against them to benefit a remote party.
It’s great that you consent. In that instance it is fine. Many do not, and to proceed with the assumption of consent should be a crime.
What is done with the data is irrelevant. Spying without explicit consent is the problem.
It’s not like they use it to build a profile of you, as goddamn chrome does.
Eh? Says who? Them?
So many times, companies have lied, cheated, made excuses. So many times "we don't", then they do.
So. Many. Times.
So I should just trust Mozilla, because... well, why?
And this doesn't even take into account new corporate owners, leveraging existing data in a new way.
Or rogue elements in corps, employees stealing data for profit, or even data leakage due to misconfigured servers.
These thongs have all happened.
Corps have left dumps of entire client databases, credit cards, id, on open portals!
Over and over, again and again, we have been shown, never ever trust anyone with your data. Ever.
The client is open source (and you can go to about:telemetry to see for yourself what it’s sending), the server side is open source, and much of that data is publicly accessible at https://telemetry.mozilla.org
The preference controlling whether telemetry is sent anywhere is "datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled". The other telemetry settings are just about what telemetry modules are enabled to collect telemetry data locally (which you still can view with about:telemetry, but will not get send when you disabled "uploadEnabled"). [1]
Disable "datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled" and Firefox will not send telemetry data around. But users cannot be expected to mess around in about:config, right? That why there is a checkbox in the Firefox preferences just for this. In the Privacy & Security tab.
Also, when you create a fresh Firefox profile (e.g. when you use it for the first time), it will open their privacy policy page, with a somewhat hidden button that brings you straight to those checkboxes. I don't like that it's a bit hidden now by default, and they could do better there (and actually did better in the past, where there was a very visible popup asking you about this stuff).
As for "they should test this!": Right, and they do have unit tests[2].
I'm all for this functionality but if the said users go to Chrome because "Firefox has no privacy" this is ridiculous. Firefox is our best browser in this domain, let's not kill it by complaining indefinitely on it.
What are you going to switch to? Chrome? Sure, it would be nice to have an easy switch that disables all telemetry, but let's not forget that every other major browsers collects far more data, and the most popular browser steers you toward to storing your entire web and location history on their servers as soon as you log into your email account. Kinda puts non-identifying information about Firefox's performance into perspective, doesn't it?
It’s not like they use it to build a profile of you, as goddamn chrome does.
I feel that whatever Mozilla does can never be good enough for some people, even though they are one of the most important players in the “fight” of OSS. Just think about it, linux is only usable as a desktop OS because most of the desktop apps migrated to the web - and firefox is the only free browser that is actually capable, as well as the only engine that is not google-controlled. We should support them as much as we can.