See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy
See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy
Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla. To continue developing features and products that resonate with our users, we’re adopting a new a
To disable it in about:config
browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled = false
browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled = false
People really need to kill that notion that telemetry is automatically bad. If the information they are collecting is minimal, as non-identifiable as possible and actually being used to help develop the browser, it's a good thing.
Yes, turbo nerds in the back, specially being opt-out, opt-in telemetry is pretty much useless for trying to understand the majority of your user base.
Syncthing is one of the best examples of telemetry done well. On first startup, they ask if you agree to enable telemetry, they show the data that will be send and inform users that the collected data can be viewed at https://data.syncthing.net/
Yeah I normally opt out of all tracking or telemetry, but when it’s a project that I feel like I can trust and want to make better I make sure to turn it on.
That must be why Mozilla and Microsoft famously serve the needs of their users so well.
Read what I said again. It is not automatically bad, and it doesn't mean it can't be poorly used or poorly understood by the ones collecting it. It just means that it is an effective way to understand how your users are using your product.
Putting Mozilla (which from what I can tell is doing as much as they can trying to collect this telemetry data in a way that can't be used to identify its users) in the same domain as Microsoft, which collects pretty much everything it can to sell to third party advertisers is ridiculous as best and disingenuous at worst.
Never mind the controversy about telemetry in general, which I suppose has its uses even if it's too often over-used. This telemetry in particular — collecting data about how many times you searched for things involving shopping, travel, real estate — is ridiculous, and cannot be justified by vague platitudes about enhancing the browsing experience.
collecting data about how many times you searched
I don't think this stores how many times you specifically have searched for something - just how many times something has been searched for in general. In other words, nobody will be able to tell anything about you from this data.
(Which is very different from e.g. the data Google collects about you and shares with its partners.)
This measure is not linked with specific individuals and is further anonymized using a technology called OHTTP to ensure it can’t be connected with user IP addresses.
it's kinda ridiculous to see them emphasise this but get called out as if they are doing so. if anything they seem to be taking the most privacy focused approach I've come across, going forward as a decent example. Also makes me appriciate that they look for other feedback than user comments cause that seems like a notoriously unreliable source of info for data-driven decisions
Speaking of large numbers of user comments, I was just reading the hacker news discussion. Whatever you think of that site, it's full of the sort of people who used to be the core of the Firefox user base. People who would help their friends and family get it installed. Web developers who made sure their site works with more than one browser engine. People who know enough to be offended by changes like this one. People who Mozilla needs to reach if it wants to have a future in the web browser market.
Comments elsewhere are similarly negative. I encourage everyone who cares about Firefox to turn off all the telemetry, or perhaps even consider moving to one of the forks such as Librewolf. If they notice enough of a drop in incoming data collection after this latest move, perhaps there's still a chance that Mozilla will get the message that they need to change course before it's too late.
MOZILLA COME ON
don't say you're adding telemetry then end with a paragraph about "making the internet safer" >_>While I do think this is wrong, security != privacy
As a LibreWolf user I found the serpEventTelemetryCategorization to be disabled by default
But serpEventTelemetry was still enabled
Is this just me or can anyone else back me up?
Confirmed. I just turned it off. It’s possible that LibreWolf never sends telemetry regardless of how this is set; I have no idea.
It might be worth creating an issue