[Farow]

Couldn't crash reports be separated from other telemetry data, possibly with a dialog letting the user whether to send a crash report or not? IIRC, the dialog used to actually exist in older Firefox versions. I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy.

[1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[kbrosnan]

The crash reports at https://crash-stats.mozilla.org are a separate opt in bit of telemetry which is a dialog that is shown when Firefox crashes. You can opt into automatically sending them by setting browser.crashReports.unsubmittedCheck.autoSubmit2 to true. It can be true if you opted into a dialog about submitting unsubmitted crash reports.

https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=crash shows automatic telemetry probes. The main bit of data in that set is FX_CONTENT_CRASH_* and you can see the back and forth from the data steward and the engineer adding the probe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269961#c8

[sfink]

> I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy.

What in that report is creepy? Surely knowing the percentage of people on 32- vs 64-bit isn't problematic. Maybe add-ons? I'm genuinely curious.

[Farow]

Usage times, usage intensity, list of all extensions, country of origin. I don't understand why they'd need those to improve Firefox.

Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.

[sfink]

(I work for Mozilla, though far from where decisions about telemetry would be made.)

Usage times and intensity are of high value when trying to improve market share. People who barely use the browser are at high risk of stopping use altogether. (For example, they might use multiple browsers, but most of their activity occurs on another and if they figure out multiple profiles or something, they'll leave altogether.) You can't do an A/B test to see what improves usage intensity if you don't measure usage intensity. Also, it's far from PII. And making it opt-in would make the stats useless; people who explicitly choose to allow telemetry are going to have vastly different usage patterns than the bulk of people who do not so choose.

Extensions are very important for crash reports. Far less than they used to be; many crashes could only happen when an extension did something specific. Extensions are now sandboxed enough that this isn't nearly as common, but if a crash signature has a high correlation with a particular extension, it can easily turn a non-actionable bug into something actionable.

Extensions for general telemetry are iffier. The info is fairly high value for things like understanding how people are using the browser and what features are popular or missing. But rare extensions also provide a lot of fingerprinting info. It's important to keep those metrics away from PII, and recorded independently so they can't be correlated.

Country of origin is pretty clearly useful. Mozilla has to allocate resources across countries, including marketing resources, but I would think it's really product management where it matters most. Users gain a lot of benefit from the browser adapting to different markets. (Screenshots have a wildly different importance in countries with Asian writing systems; Europe and especially Germany take privacy much more seriously.)

> Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.

Heh. I do not want to predict what our marketing people will or won't do. I have mixed feelings about quite a few things. I'm not happy about ads appearing anywhere in the interface. But I'm also not happy about being dependent on Google ad money.

[saagarjha]

> And making it opt-in would make the stats useless; people who explicitly choose to allow telemetry are going to have vastly different usage patterns than the bulk of people who do not so choose.

How about the profiles of the people who opt-out?

[sfink]

First, it's a small percentage. Or believed to be a small percentage. There are some larger buckets (eg distributions that disable telemetry), but it's possible to do very rough estimates of the sizes of those through other means. And anyway, the vast majority of users are on Windows.

Second, it's fair: if you disable telemetry, you're choosing to not be considered in any telemetry-backed decision making. If you want to still be considered, then it's up to you to make your opinions heard in some other way. (Filing bugs or https://connect.mozilla.org or discussions in places like here, though note that the latter is mostly useless. Not many Mozilla people read this forum or take what is said here very seriously. And even if they do people will be vigorously arguing both sides so it's easy to pick the side you already agree with.)

There's nothing wrong with disabling telemetry. I respect the decision, and I'd certainly rather have people using Firefox with telemetry disabled than have those people not use Firefox. But it's your browser, and even the social contract by which you're using it doesn't say you owe us telemetry data.