[marginalia_nu]

Firefox periodically dials home and reconfigures itself based on the arbitrary whims of Mozilla. It's really kind of disgusting.

[Dalewyn]

For those interested, the mothership is: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org

I'm fairly certain the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and it's among the top 10 most blocked addresses in my Pi-Hole.

Frankly, I'm weighing the benefits to cost ratio of just blacklisting all Mozilla domains if this gets worse.

[jimbobthrowawy]

Telemetry and "studies" are both checkboxes in the privacy section of firefox's preferences.

I usually turn both off right after changing the default search engine and disabling search suggestions, when I setup a new install.

[marginalia_nu]

Turns out this only turns off some of the telemetry. Turning it off completely is not entirely trivial.

https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...

[Dalewyn]

Mozilla claiming to be the champions of privacy (among other virtues) makes this arguably worse than Google, Microsoft, et al. because they're at least upfront about their telemetry.

[martijnvds]

And the other browsers don't?

I've had my share of weird issues in Chrome because they enabled an "experiment" of some kind.

[marginalia_nu]

Yes, they are all doing it, and it's all bad. Though Firefox is especially culpable since most of their marketing is about privacy. It's apparently only bad when other people are spying on their users.