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by einpoklum 700 days ago
> I'd trust mozilla more than most

More than Google or Microsoft does not say much. And - judging by how hard it is to fully disable telemetry and call-home on, say, Mozilla Thunderbird:

https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798

I wouldn't trust them very much.

(Yes, I know it's a different project and not the same team but Mozilla is still the parent entity etc. etc.)
1 comments
eesmith 700 days ago
Gahh! I'm planning a move from macOS to some Linux-based OS once this laptop dies. I've had 20+ years of using Mail.app and thought that Thunderbird would be the appropriate replacement.

But that link, and the comments at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/thunderbird-should-by-d... ('Given that significant parts of Thunderbirds user interface (addons manager details, welcome page, whats new on updates etc) are essentially served as web pages into Thunderbird, perhaps your expectations are becoming unreasonable.') tell me that Thunderbird does not respect my desire to minimize my info leakage to the outside world.

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einpoklum 700 days ago
The "served as web pages" is a bit misleading. It just means that the UI layout engine takes HTML or XML, not that information is passed through a web server.
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eesmith 700 days ago
Sure, but the link concerned all telemetry, of which accessing a web page, even just to show what's news, is one.

The overall attitude included comments like 'I would like to see significantly more anonymous telemetry not less', while I want no network connections in my mail reader except that which I specifically initiate.

These are people so acculturated to data collection that they don't understand that some others don't want it.

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einpoklum 699 days ago
There are organizational incentives to this approach - at Mozilla / Thunderbird, with which I have a bone to pick; but also elsewhere.

A couple of years back I was involved in an argument about doing something a bit similar in LibreOffice:

https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2022/11/01/commun...

Note the back-and-forth in the comments.

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eesmith 699 days ago
I understand why developers want feedback. I have paying customers for my software library and I can't get useful feedback from then about what features they use.

OTOH, why can't get get UI feedback from logging institutional users for different domains, where they can get real legal and ethical consent from the institution side?

I mean, yes, it's easier to force it on everyone and have them swallow the pill for lack of alternatives than it is to deal with organizations. But then the issue isn't one of lack of data, it's that they don't want to deal with organizations as equals, since that takes more work.

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