This kind of statement have way less impact when people already have 0 goodwill toward the one that says it.

Wow. Actually doing something after a kid’s death. That’s a new one.

Tech definitely is. Gate-keeping, stupid pricing, etc. done by few corporations and individual isn’t.

“I don’t understand, that user keeps asking me to fix their email, and they’re more angry each time!”

It’s easier to do damage from the inside by manipulating stupid people, I guess.

I’m not going to enumerate them, mostly because I did not keep track of which one was on and which one was off before messing all of them up. If you’re curious, open “about:config” and search for “survey*.enabled”, “collect*.enabled”. Even with all settings disabled, some of them remains on, and they do cause traffic to the (documented) endpoints.

Who gives a shit about him. This is not going to end well for everyone.

Yes, you can disable the settings that are exposed to you with a checkbox. How about all the other that have no checkboxes and you can find by snooping around in either the code or about:config ?

I have not dug too deep into it for now (especially if I end up changing browser), but even with everything in the preferences disabled, examining the content of about:config gives a lot of telemetry.whatever.enabled left to true, sometimes with names that do not seem to match any option given to the user. That’s not a good look either.

Yeah. And their privacy notice is basically a mix-match of ten or so sections that have no place in a web browser privacy policy, that allows them to do the things people reproach them for doing.

It’s like saying “we’re not doing that, because we’re limited by that document that allows us to do just that”. And now they’re tripling down on it.

if it’s properly handled and anonymized it benefits everyone using firefox

glub glub much?

There is no justification for opt-out telemetry data collection, and there is no proper handling of data obtained despite user pushback. Also, properly anonymizing large data sets is not as trivial as you think. Even “fully anonymized” data set, assuming everything’s possible’s been done, can lead to correlation when added with other data. Even “cohorts” can lead to the creation of an aggregate group with so few individuals that it basically boils down to individual tracking.

Why do you think people are so vocal about not letting any of this happens in the first time? It’s not for blind idealism. It’s basically because even a minimum waiver on “supposedly anonymous” data is a huge blow to your privacy. And some people care about that.

Besides, Mozilla’s been pushing for a shitton of features that are constantly blamed for Firefox becoming as bad as its competition, and constantly turned off/removed. If they cared even a tiny bit about user feedback, the last… 3, 5 years of decisions from Mozilla would have been very different. Feature usage telemetry is a joke to make people accept their bullshit; the only thing that influence feature development is management or very heavy pushback, and that happens in dev issues, not with telemetry feedback.

Sadly, this is unlikely to lead to the death of people, so it won’t be reverted in a week, but have long lasting effects. I guess it’s not a problem as long as there’s a decent health infrastructure to hold up the increased issues, right?

Because he, and his base, are happy with them.

First, mostly as if in Firefox. Go open Netflix, just for the laugh of it.

Second, a fork that depends on Mozilla’s power to develop the upstream is not really in the clear. From a licensing perspective, sure. But let’s assume the worst (because it’s 2025 after all). Firefox is no longer open source. Sure, we can fork from where they left. But building, maintaining, and evolving a browser engine (and the browser itself) requires substantial work. Which means, developers/maintainers, and money. And staying on a “bare” browser might not be viable as long as standards keeps evolving and 95% of people will not care about that stuff.

All that to say, a fork is an option for now. A more tangible solution for the future is needed. A new “Mozilla” without the $millions CEO and structure, Mozilla splitting Firefox into a clean base and a commercial product, something else. But not a fork that just follow Firefox source.

We notice. They’re not hiding. The (numerous) endpoints are all presents in the about:config page. The actual content, though, is not that obvious to get. If we assume the binaries are compromised (I don’t believe they are for now, for the record), an outsider would only see a TLS session. At best we could get the vague amount of data exfiltrated, not really the content. But that’s hypothetical. For now.

how are they supposed to “sell your data”

First step is collecting it. Putting provisions to grab everything from the software you installed on your device and use to do everything is a good start. Second step is selling it. Data broker loves data, surprisingly. And even small, inconsequential stuff can go a long way when you can correlate with dozens, or hundreds, of data points.

if you just never use a Mozilla account

Given how it’s implemented, the data pushed inside your account may be in a safer place than what you use the browser to do daily at this point.

and uncheck all the telemetry

Funny thing. Even with everything unchecked/disabled/toggled off/whatever, there’s a handful of ping back and other small reports that are configured to go out. You can turn these off using the complete config page; the one that warns people that its dangerous and have no clear way to know what most of its options do.

Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source

If by “secretly” you mean without us knowing, it would be hard indeed, as long as people did look into the source AND the built images were faithful to the source, too. They are not doing it secretly, at least for now, anyway. That’s the point of their “privacy notice” that includes basically everything, which they then use as a safeguard saying "we can’t do shit (unless specified in the privacy notice).

It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software

The policy changes comes from Mozilla. Were written, published, and updated by Mozilla, on their blog (and legal pages). What the fuck are you talking about with Google?

Heck, if you knew 2cts about this, Google actually low-key needs Firefox to exists as a counterpoint to Chrome’s hegemony, unless they want another trial for being too good at their job.

Don’t collect anything on your own and don’t sell the things you don’t collect. Bam, problem solved.

Is it safe to bring back retired people? They retire for a reason, usually.

You don’t need advanced scanning technology running on every device with access to every single bit of data you ever seen to detect scam. You need telco operator to stop forwarding forged messages headers and… that’s it. Cheap, efficient, zero risk related to invasion of privacy through a piece of software you did not need but was put there “for your own good”.

I agree. I’d even be willing to regularly donate to a foundation that would have this aim as their goal and have their acts matching their promises.

Although, not necessarily a new engine. Going from scratch is a good way to remake a lot of mistakes, while reusing old code is a good way to keep old debt. That’s not a decision I would like to have to take.