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Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way
- cardiac 9y agoIt's a matter of time until "differential privacy" gets cracked. The only private part to it is in the name. There is no need to collect this data but to sell it to another party.
- jordache 9y agois mozilla planning on circumventing all of the methods outlined here for identifying unique users? https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
- kogepathic 9y ago> What we plan to do now is run an opt-out SHIELD study [6] to validate our implementation of RAPPOR. IMHO, this is a bad idea. Many people I know already use Firefox because they're weary to give Google (Chrome) all their data. Firefox should make this feature opt-in only.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago> Firefox should make this feature opt-in only. I agree, but note that they are explicitly trying to get more info than they can from the small, biased sample that is users opting in.
- wila 9y agoThen they should fix that by asking in the GUI politely if you are willing to share and also explain how-to disable it easily. Just starting to collect your browsing data is a bad idea (tm) especially if your main claim is "more privacy".
- kogepathic 9y ago> they are explicitly trying to get more info than they can from the small, biased sample that is users opting in. Maybe because most people using Firefox use it precisely because they don't want the browser vendor to track their behaviour? I wonder how the Torbrowser folks will deal with this.
- Fuxy 9y agoThey claim is biased but is it really biased? How do they know? I think this is just making up excuses so they can collect more data. They get good enough data from the people that have volunteered it. I don't know what makes them think it's biased but I seriously doubt that is true.
- Operyl 9y agoBecause, usually the kind of people that’d opt in are techies/power users or work (volunteer, or paid) for Mozilla themselves. Let’s say only 1% of your userbase opts in to this, how is that not biased? (As it currently stands, I believe this is a further optin in a tucked away menu).
- yorwba 9y agoThen they should make the possibility to opt-in more prominent, instead of switching to opt-out with the option tucked away in some menu where only techies/power users will disable it.
- pishpash 9y agoThe Mozilla user base is already biased. Plus they can run experimental test fixtures to canvas sites. This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
- gcp 9y ago>They claim is biased but is it really biased? How do they know? I think this is just making up excuses so they can collect more data. Informed, constructive opinion there. One clear sign of the bias is that the crash rate of the browser goes up massively every time a new version transforms from beta to release. Clearly, it's not renaming that string that makes the browser crash. The populations are just fundamentally different. To give an obvious example, beta users are overwhelmingly more like to have up to date video drivers. (Which can be seen in crash reports, but is also very logical).
- spiderfarmer 9y agoAbsolutely. If this is helping users, it should be easy to convince them to turn it on.
- Ajedi32 9y agoThat's not how it works. Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is; and when it comes to anonymous usage statistics, "most users" is _exactly_ the group of people you want to be collecting them from; otherwise your results will be skewed heavily in favor of a small minority of power users.
- huhtenberg 9y ago> Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is These users will be installing Chrome, not Firefox.
- Ajedi32 9y agoI hope not. If that's true, then Firefox is in serious trouble. There aren't nearly enough power users and privacy enthusiasts around to make Firefox a significant player in the browser market all on their own.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’s exactly why Firefox is around 5% global marketshare. Only the powerusers are left. And this move will also drive them away.
- quickben 9y agoWhy not? The switch barrier is non existent. Most of the replies in this thread are ideological. Nobody is arguing CSS rendering speed comparisons and such. People use Firefox because they like it. People are irrational but like is huge. Toyota over Hyundai. Vacations at the sea instead of skiing. Firefox over Chrome. The like is a habit, but if all things are equal and free, a very flexible one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoThis might finally prompt me to start compiling Firefox for all my devices, or at least evaluate some of the high profile forks. It's not just about the data, it's about the lack of consent. If you just ask people for permission on the initial startup, I'm sure most people will be fine with enabling it. Last time I installed Firefox, it just showed a tiny bar at the bottom of the window, which is pretty easy to miss. I'd expect fewer dark patterns from Mozilla, that's the kind of shady behavior you see coming from Microsoft. I always try my best to disable or block anything which phones home without explicitly asking for consent. Tunnelblick [0] is a good example of this being done well. On the initial run they ask if you want to enable automatic updates. It includes the option to disable sending anonymous system information, as well as including a disclosure widget with a brief explanation and a table showing the information that would be sent. [1] [0] https://www.tunnelblick.net https://www.tunnelblick.net [1] http://i.imgur.com/tWQX5aB.png http://i.imgur.com/tWQX5aB.png
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoThis might not be so bad as I expected from the title, but implementation details will really matter. If, for instance, they collect exact homepage URLs, they cannot make it anonymous (some site include username as URL components).
- DangerousPie 9y agoThey are only considering collecting "eTLD+1, e.g. facebook.com or google.co.uk" so this should almost certainly not be an issue.
- icebraining 9y agoMy homepage is my self-hosted reader, at rss.<myname>.com :)
- cJ0th 9y agoWhile I do understand the allure of collecting this kind of data I find it highly disturbing to see this from Mozilla. I think not having perfect information about the users is a trade off that should be made in order stay an alternative to most other browsers. There are still ways to get more data by other means, though. When it comes to most visited websites, for instance, the alexa ranking should give a good, if not perfect, idea.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- damnfine 9y agoI say it over and over. You can not completely anonymize data with any reliability. Please note the qualifier, many systems work for many vectors, but any sufficiently large dataset can be used to graph habits and correlate them. Maybe there is a safe way, but I put the onus of proving it on the person implementing it.
- veeti 9y agoRTFA: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6981.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6981.pdf
- digitalzombie 9y ago> You can not completely anonymize data with any reliability. Well... there's actually a field for that. I forgot what they call that field because of how niche it is but my friend at google is doing just that. He said there are math theorem to prove that it's sufficiently anonymize. He gave an example of how Netflix competition with the data they gave researchers were able to deanonymize it. And his job was to prevent that at google. I can see why if you're trying to sell users data while maintaining privacy.
- kuschku 9y agoMozilla currently uses Google Analytics for tracking, with "IP Anonymization" enabled. Which, according to Google’s FAQ, https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en, just blanks out the last byte of the IP. Which is useless, because it still includes enough personalized data as to be completely and utterly reversible.
- flyinghamster 9y agoNot to mention, if we're talking about IPv6 addresses, they often get allocated as /64 (or even /60 or /56) blocks. Such "anonymization" becomes useless at that point.
- veeti 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zb3 9y agoI've removed all URLs from about:config and replaced them with localhost (search for "http"). This should help with privacy-related issues as long as no API endpoint is hardcoded.
- kuschku 9y agoI did the same, but used https://error.invalid/ https://error.invalid/, as that URL is guaranteed to never resolve.
- icebraining 9y agoCurious; I didn't know about that TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.invalid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.invalid
- jwilk 9y agoUnfortunately, it is not. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761#section-6.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761#section-6.4 > Name resolution APIs and libraries SHOULD recognize "invalid" names as special and SHOULD always return immediate negative responses. Name resolution APIs SHOULD NOT send queries for "invalid" names to their configured caching DNS server(s). It's only SHOULD, not MUST. And in fact, the glibc resolver (and I bet also other major implementations) does send such queries to the DNS server.
- kuschku 9y ago> And in fact, the glibc resolver (and I bet also other major implementations) does send such queries to the DNS server. Using the glibc resolver as baseline is a bad idea, it’s broken beyond hope. Try resolving http://-emmawatson.tumblr.com/ http://-emmawatson.tumblr.com/, which is a valid URL under newer standards, and works on all other systems. The Glibc authors refuse to merge patches fixing this, because they disagree with the standard.
- Vinnl 9y agoNote: "planning" means "reaching out for feedback about". Also interesting: the method they plan on using for anonymising this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Principle_and_illustration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Principle... If that is not sufficiently anonymous, then please submit the reasoning why to Mozilla.
- fenwick67 9y agoThis is like saying "diffie hellman key exchange has no flaws, therefore https implementations are perfectly secure".
- Vinnl 9y agoI'm not saying anything has no flaws, just that if it has, it would be nice if you would inform Mozilla about them.
- clarkevans 9y agoI think the burden here is backwards? URLs may contain Protected Health and other Identifying Information. If this data leaks SSL and could be sent to a 3rd party, then it makes Firefox an unsuitable client for a great many applications. EDIT: OK. It's boolean flags (like use of flash) plus an eTLD+1 (example.org; not myname.example.org?). Even so, I believe this tracking should be opt-in with a disclosure screen that explains exactly what Mozilla is recording. Informed consent is a practice we should be promoting, even if it seems unnecessary.
- icebraining 9y agoThey're not planning to send full URLs, only domains. Also, the system described is resistant to attacks even if the data is captured (SSL leaks). I don't have enough statistical knowledge to understand how that works, though.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’s still personalized data. Mozilla has been violating even the minimal legal standards in the EU for years, and no one cares. It’s insanity that an organization promoting its products with privacy doesn’t even meet the minimal legal standards. We’re seeing Google Analytics tracking in parts of the browser ("Get new Addons" page, for example), without even the legally required cookie warning. EU law is clear on this, as soon as you store any data, do any tracking, connect to any third party, or transmit anything for analytics, you have get opt-in.
- embik 9y agoThis is ridiculous. I use and recommend Firefox for pure ideological reasons, because frankly, Chrome/Chromium is miles ahead of them. If they start opt-out tracking using the same approach as Google I do not see any reason to use it nor install it for my friends and family. That's some data for you, Mozilla.
- monochromatic 9y agoHow is Chrome miles ahead? Both seem to work just fine for me, neither being noticeably faster or better. I like a couple of minor Firefox features, so that's what I stick with.
- toxican 9y agoFirefox -> Chrome is a sidegrade at best. Literally only reason I use it is because I got fed up with weird little CSS quirks I couldn't replicate in IE or FF, but were very present in Chrome.
- Yoric 9y agoAs you may have read in the feedback request, Mozilla is proposing to use differential privacy – differential is very different from tracking. For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy for instance.
- embik 9y agoMy point is not the way you label gathering information from your users but rather that it is about implementing something Google proposed. If the mechanism works, fine, but why should I use Firefox over Chromium then? Opt-out data collection is in violation to my core beliefs and what I believed to be Mozilla's principles. Collecting data without asking the user about it is - to me - in violation to the very definition of privacy and calling some way to anonymise data (who guarantees that the cryptographic approach to this is not obsolete in a few years?) "differential privacy" is at the very least dishonest.
- suby 9y agoI've been using Firefox as my only browser for at least 12 years. If they go through with this, I'll switch to something else. I don't know how they could think that this is acceptable.
- drtillberg 9y agoI think Mozilla's boldness in stating the plan to systematically leak user information, is a tipping point. Will increase usage of Opera, Midori, Chromium. As for Tor integration with Firefox, that really is a shame, I hope Tor integrates with something else.
- Yoric 9y agoIt's not "stating the plan", it's calling for feedback. If you disagree, provide feedback :)
- kuschku 9y agoOh, it’s simple. Just comply with EU law, and it’s all okay. That includes: 1. You can not collect anything without explicit opt-in 2. You can not transmit any data to a third party 3. If a user requests it, you have to provide all data stored about them, and have to provide a way for them to delete all of that. (And you have to provide this at least once every 12 months via letter, fax or email for free) (compare §34 BDSG)
- yuhong 9y agoI wonder which kind of data it actually applies to though.
- kuschku 9y agoAll and any. That includes IP addresses (just connecting to a socket without a user explicitly starting that action), names, emails, hashed IPs, it includes usernames, CC data, messages, interactions with webpages. Anything that in any way is connected to a person is covered by this. This directive is also the origin of the cookie disclaimers, which require opt-in before collecting statistics or loading any third party tracking solution.
- lazarus101 9y agoPlease don't turn Firefox into a botnet!
- js8 9y agoI liked Firefox for years. I have lived through years of shenanigans such as broken extensions, forgetting what tabs I had open because Firefox accidentally closed without restoring them, moving icons and menus around for no reason, and recently, an update on my Ubuntu that broke scrolling of pages (with PgUp/PgDown). And now this.. I am starting to think that they just don't want people to use Firefox. Yeah, I know it's free software, so I have no right to complain. I just wonder why?
- tunap 9y agoWhere governments and corporations are concerned, the "why" condenses down to two simple answers: commercialization(profit) or weaponization(control)... it is easily conceivable that both will result over time. I hope Tor & EFF start giving more love to Pale Moon & it's ilk, but that may just be mitigating the inevitable death by 1000 cuts to privacy.
- eli 9y agoI think it's worth approaching this with an open mind and giving Firefox at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty plain to see how such aggregate usage data would lead to a better product for everyone. How many people here use website/app analytics to improve products they work on?
- tjoff 9y agoIt's pretty plain to see how such aggregate usage data would lead to a better product for everyone. No, it is not. Especially not for something such as a browser which is mostly transparent to the content.
- eli 9y agoBrowser performance is very closely tied to specifics of the content. That's why optimizing for e.g. JS benchmarks doesn't always result in a browser that feels any faster.
- tjoff 9y agoI can't think of a statement more vague than that. Or why any external data would be needed at all, let alone why the opt-in data would not be sufficient?
- sp332 9y agoHere's an example from Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495939
- nerdponx 9y agoWhat I have not seen here is a discussion of how, exactly, collecting browsing behavior will help Mozilla improve Firefox.
- veeti 9y agoStart by actually bothering to read the link: > One recurring ask from the Firefox product teams is the ability to collect more sensitive data, like how features perform on specific sites. > [for example]: "Which sites does a user see heavy Jank on?"
- madez 9y agoAsk for it. Don't just collect the data. Ffs, what has the team behind FireFox become? I need a new browser.
- wbl 9y agoThey have telemetry and it isn't enough.
- Ygg2 9y agoThey did and too few people said yes. On the other hand, everyone complains Firefox is slow. So,few pay, few opt in, and everyone complains.
- tunap 9y ago"They did and too few people said yes." There's the answer. And the response? "Tough shit", we'll take away that choice granularly. For our own good, apparently. Moz has been giving tough shit with caveats for more than a few years now. Perhaps that is why market share is falling?
- Ygg2 9y agoThere is a story about people getting driver's license having a check box to opt-in into being organ donors, and very few said yes. Once the box was changed to opt-out, very few said no :) The question is are people saying no because they are privacy conscious, or because they don't care. My money is on latter. In general more people care about Firefox being fast than security. What's a bigger issue for Firefox is deprecating its add-ons. That's going to hurt its marketshare way more than telemetry data.
- chinathrow 9y ago"One recurring ask from the Firefox product teams is the ability to collect more sensitive data, like top sites users visit and how features perform on specific sites." I would say that is none of the browser vendors business. Please stay away with your opt-out stuff - it bothers me. Make it opt-in, always and forever.
- jasonkostempski 9y agoEven opt-in is a problem. There's no way to be 100% sure the checkbox in the UI is and always will be respected. It maybe something as innocent as logic woopsie or something as nefarious as intentionally and quietly changing it to opt-out during an update. A better option, keep the data sharing code out of Firefox; opt-in to log locally; if they user decides they want to share something with Mozilla, give them instructions on how to email or upload the files.
- yakult 9y ago1. Any data collection at all deanonymizes the user, cf panopticlick. 2. Frankly even opt-out is not acceptable. I can't recommend any software that peridically asks users for data access, since there exist non-technical users who have a nonzero chance of clicking yes to everything. If they are related to me in some way this compromises my privacy also.
- sp332 9y ago1. Any data collection at all deanonymizes the user, cf panopticlick. This isn't true. Panopticlick collects a ton of data about your browser that this proposal will not. There has been a lot of research done in this area and we know how to collect anonymous datasets. https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981
- yakult 9y agoLook at it from a security-conscious user's perspective: I would have to verify that: 1. The concept is sound. 2. It is implemented as described. 3. It is implemented with no bugs. 4. Mozilla is trustworthy 5. Any third-parties Mozilla involves in this process are also trustworthy. 6. All of the above will remain true. Doing this would take a tremendous amount of both time and expertise, if even possible. If every piece of software I use makes me do this every year or so, I would get nothing else done. In practical terms, your argument is no better than just saying, 'trust us, we're good for it', regardless of the merits of your tech. And we know Mozilla baked Google Analytics into FF's addon page, so trust is in short supply.
- NabenHarb 9y agoExcept if you actually read and understood the link, points #1, 4, 5 aren't a concern. Moreover, points #2, 3, and 6 apply to just about every piece of software used.
- yakult 9y agowhat percentage of FF users on the planet do you expect could read a paper on differential privacy and actually verify those points, while understanding all the ifs and gotchas, and be able to tell if any of the arguments are wrong? What percentage of that elite group would actually be willing to devote the time and energy, for free, for every one of the thousands of softwares they use?
- reacweb 9y agoDo not do that. Privacy respect is the most important differentiating point of firefox.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- criddell 9y agoI wonder how valuable the data is going to be for the Firefox team? The cost in reputation may be large, so I'm guessing this must be pretty important for them.
- zaro 9y agoOn one hand Mozilla doing something like that is anti privacy. On the other hand how is Mozilla supposed to impprove FF w/o detailed usage data. In theory can be done, but in practice they are competing with Chrome and their team has waaay more data to use. And th is data gives them an edge at least on the decision which parts are worth improving. So they can either start collecting some data and really piss off their most vocal privacy minded users and try to use this data to improve FF and steer it away from the death spiral it's on. Or they can keep the vocal privacy minded people happy continue to work in the dark and pretty much ensure that FF will become one of the insignificant .3% market share browsers. Because somehow I kind of feel that multimilion fundraisers to make FF popular again aren't gonna happen second time.
- madez 9y agoWhy would FireFox be on a dead spiral for not tracking it's users? If they want browsing data, then can use their own.
- zaro 9y agoEnglish is not my native language so maybe I didn't express myself clearly. It is not on a death spiral bevause of the missing user tracking. It's on a death spiral because of Google and Chrome. And tracking is a way of catching up. It's much easier to improve when you know what your users do with your software.
- froydnj 9y ago(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla) The problem with our own browsing data--by which I'm assuming you mean the browsing habits of our ~1000 employees--is that it's wildly non-representative of the broader population. For instance, people here routinely have browser sessions with 10, 100, or even 1000+ tabs. These numbers also indicate that the browser is an application you start, and then you just leave up for a while, perhaps until you restart your computer or you have to update for whatever reason. The latest statistics we collected on a broader sample of users indicates that the average number of tabs is...2. The average session length is on the order of minutes, not days. Such knowledge leads to very different choices when deciding what browser features to prioritize. And it's not just browsing usage, either: most employees probably have a top-of-the line (or close to it) Mac laptop, Windows desktop, or Linux desktop; developers have a machine with four, eight, or even more cores. These machines are hardly representative of the wider Firefox user base: a significant majority of our users (~70%) has a machine with two cores, and users with a single core in their machines outnumber users with 8+ cores. We'll not even cover graphics hardware or screen resolution here; see https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ for more examples. Using our own browsing habits and our own machine specs for making decisions is not feasible.
- huhtenberg 9y agoThe single largest advantage of Firefox over other browsers is that despite all odds and occasional missteps they managed to respect users' desire for complete privacy. For Firefox we want to better understand how people use our product to improve their experience. Sure thing. But the fact that they are unhappy that some (many?) people are opting-out from the data collection is merely a sign that they don't want to understand why people are using Firefox in the first place. By opting out from the data collection people effectively tell them over and over again that they don't want for Mozilla "to understand how they use Firefox" or "to improve their experience", not at the expense of their privacy. No phoning home. No telemetry, no data collection. No "light" version of the same, no "privacy-respecting" what-have-you. No means No. Nada. Zilch. Try and shovel any of that down people's throats and the idea of Firefox as a user's browser will die.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gvx 9y ago> Currently we can collect this data when the user opts in, but we don't have a way to collect unbiased data, without explicit consent (opt-out). That to me suggests the problem isn't that too many people are opting-out, it's that not enough people are opting-in.
- throwaway2048 9y agoClearly those users that dont choose to opt in are wrong, and mozilla needs to make this choice for them... This trend towards parentalism in software, especially software that is supposed to be user driven is frankly a steaming pile of garbage. If you have any shred of pretense of being pro-privacy and pro-user dont do this mozilla.
- gvx 9y agoIt's more that a lot of people really don't care one way or another, and will neither go out of their way to opt-in or opt-out. Additionally, it's not that Mozilla just disregards user privacy here: differential privacy being used would mean that no user has to reveal their private information, but looking at all the data in aggregate would still allow Mozilla to gain useful information on how to make Firefox better.
- thinkMOAR 9y ago"If Firefox is dedicated to preserving privacy, then no Opt-in data feature should be added. " I really don't understand this of the user, while previous sentence he writes: "but I will say that I believe Opt-in is pro-privacy, while Opt-out is anti-privacy."
- ajc-sorin 9y agoI think he's saying that not having an opt-in/out feature would show FF's dedication towards privacy, but if they are going to have an Opt-feature, Opt-in is better than opt-out.
- Multicomp 9y agoYeah, if you could keep your hands off from collecting my data without my consent, that would be great. Otherwise I might as well just use Chrome. Hopefully some PR guy will pour some water on this before it turns into a dumpster fire.
- jancsika 9y agoThis is really slick. It's like describing to a spouse a system of sex with strangers that includes blindfolds and a hazmat suit. Such a system could be a great way for a person to learn more about their sexual tastes and improve coitus overall. If the spouse is anxious about the system, then all they have to do is find a problem with the hazmat suit that would endanger the... Wait, spouse, you haven't even studied the system that I so carefully designed to protect you from the possibility of... Spouse? Has anyone seen my spouse?
- yuhong 9y agoWorth mentioning is that they are using https://github.com/google/rappor https://github.com/google/rappor
- norea-armozel 9y agoI'm not sure why Mozilla needs to track what sites I'm going to but if they add tracking into their browser then I'm just going to have to find another browser or at least put together a build of Firefox without the tracking. It's not so much that I have anything to hide but the fact that I'm not interested in being their product. If they can't remember that they're a nonprofit that's suppose to make a FOSS-based browser which doesn't spy on people and works well with web standards then they just need to shutdown. I know that's extreme but I'm just frustrated with the further corporatization of the Internet even on the margins like Firefox. Everything just has to be a product or a way to commodify the use thereof.
- fenwick67 9y agoIt's my computer, my data, and my bandwidth. If they do not provide an opt-in/out I'm going to start using a Chromium fork instead.
- kannanvijayan 9y agoI can do a quick summary of what's being proposed and why. I work in the JS team at Mozilla and deal directly with the problems caused by insufficient data. Please note that I'm speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole. Tracking down regressions, crashes, and perf issues without good telemetry about how often it's happening and in what context. Issues that might have otherwise taken a few days to resolve with good info, become multi-week efforts at reproduction-of-the-issue with little information. It simply boils down to the fact that we can't build a better browser without good information on how it's behaving in the wild. That's the pain point anyway. Mozilla's general mission, however, makes it very difficult to collect detailed data - user privacy is paramount. So we have two major issues that conflict: the need to get better information about how the product is serving users, and the need for users to be secure in their browsing habits. We also know from history that benevolent intent is not that significant. Organizations change, and intents change, and data that's collected now with good intent can be used with bad intent in the future. So we need to be careful about whatever compromise we choose, to ensure that a change of intent in the future doesn't compromise our original guarantees to the user. This is a proposed compromise that is being floated. Don't collect URLs, but only top-level+1 domains (e.g. images.google.com), and associate information with that. That lets us know broadly what sites we are seeing problems on, hopefully without compromising the user's privacy too much. Also, the information associated with the site is performance data: the time spent by the longest garbage-collection, paint janks. This is a difficult compromise to make, which is why I assume it took so long for Mozilla to come around to proposing this. These public outreaches are almost always the last stage of a length internal discussion on whether proposals fit within our mission or not. I'm not directly involved in this proposal, but I personally think it's necessary, and strikes a reasonable balance between the privacy-for-users and actionable-information-for-developers requirements.
- belorn 9y agoIf user privacy is paramount, then there are multiple ways to lower the privacy incursion that is caused by the data collection. Only collect top-level domains of Alexa rank 1k. That users are using a highway is less sensitive than a specific street where there only exists 5 homes, and it reassures users that private domain names won't be leaked. Send the data through Tor. That way you only get the data about the browser <-> site interaction, not user<->browser<->site interaction. And make it opt-in and notify users of the purpose of the data collection. A good model to follow here is Debian installer and popcon. Follow the good practices of data collection in the free software world and do not use dark patterns.
- mattdeboard 9y agoMan, Mozilla has been planning to do this for a long time! One of my first open-source contributions was helping a team work on this exact issue, and that was in early 2010.
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y agoInstead of talking about collecting anonymized data, these companies should lead with talking about how they can effectively anonymize it. I have yet to be convinced.
- AznHisoka 9y agoThis doesn't matter. SimilarWeb, Jumpshot and other clickstream companies are already doing this, in an even more non-transparent manner by using browser extensions that track every URL you visit, and searches you do, let alone the domain. I say let Mozilla give them some competition!
- Raphmedia 9y ago> "Which top sites are users visiting?" Could someone explains to me how this information is useful to a browser vendor? It's not as if they are optimizing on a site by site basis.
- jasonkostempski 9y agoThey want to sell user data, plain and simple. "Improve user experience" is the standard excuse. Basically they're saying we want to collect a bunch of information we already know people don't want us collecting, so we want to make it opt-out and we'll pinky-swear it will be kept anonymous. There's no way for them to send data to their servers truly anonymously; there's no way for them to guarantee everyone who has access to the data before it's anonymized will not do something they're not supposed to. They're asking us to move away from a not having to trust anyone to trusting them by default. I'm sure you already know all this and I'm sure people are getting sick of hearing rants about it every time it comes up. This is the second time in a week for a Mozilla product. I suspect they're trying to exhaust the ranters so they're just left with the users who don't care, "have nothing to hide", or think it's their duty to help the browser vendor squash bugs. No software or service should be trusted until it's absolutely necessary to get the job the user wants done, not the job the browser vendor wants done. It will never be necessary for a browser to send browsing data back to the browser vendor to get to a website.
- syshum 9y agoAnd the trend towards being a Google Chrome Clone continues... First it was killing customization. Now they are killing Privacy. Why should I use this browser again?
- alexrs95 9y agoI work at Mozilla, but I'm speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole. For those interested in understand more about this project and why we're doing it, here you can find an introduction of Differential Privacy and what we're trying to do. https://twitter.com/Alexrs95/status/896366072240144385 https://twitter.com/Alexrs95/status/896366072240144385
- joosters 9y agoAs a user, I don't want to waste my time learning up on Differential Privacy. Am I really expected to read up on it and prove to myself that the theories work and are safe to use? Why should I take the risk that the mechanism might leak data? The only sensible secure choice is to not allow it. Let users opt-in, don't force them to opt-out.
- tjoff 9y agoWhat you guys just won't grasp is that: 1. You will absolutely obliterate any trust you have with actions like this. This is important. Because if you continue to ignore this and you will have tons of data but you will be absolutely clueless as to why your product and brand are completely abandoned. 2. This data isn't worth that much to begin with. Here is a crazy idea, try to make a better browser instead.
- moosingin3space 9y agoThis data will be used in the pursuit of #2. As it turns out, a lack of understanding of what users are doing with their browsers is an obstacle to making a better browser. Performance issues in complex systems often only show up in production, and that's what Mozilla is trying to collect this data to fix.
- joosters 9y agoWhy is opt-in data not sufficient? Why can't Mozilla take the top-N sites and test them out for themselves?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- have_faith 9y agoCan someone more knowledgable than me explain the benefits to this data collection exactly? The link mentioned finding urls with jank and the like, is it not easy to find such sites? The real problem seems to just be marketing though. Regular people either don't see any reason to consider looking for an alternative browser or don't understand the differences. Years ago Firefox had a larger market share because the internet as a whole had a larger share of tech-savvy people and they had IE as a competitor.
- darrmit 9y agoI still use Firefox specifically because of Chrome's privacy concerns and was under the impression after dropping FirefoxOS Mozilla was headed in the right direction. It seems they've convinced themselves that the only way to improve the product is to collect data on their users, rather than continuing to push the idea of privacy - which, in my opinion, if marketed correctly, could win over a lot of users. The browser is still fundamentally awesome. This seems like the kind of thing they could push through their TestPilot program and just market it, rather than pushing it to everyone by default. But I imagine they want to push it to everyone specifically so they can take advantage of those who are ignorant to the ability to opt-out.
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoI guess any browser wants to dominate the platform. It turns into another IE once it succeeds at doing so. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
- sp332 9y agoIt seems your premise is wrong since Firefox's market share has been steadily declining for years. Privacy apparently doesn't matter to that many people.
- darrmit 9y agoI suppose you're right, I just know that privacy has become more of a known issue than it was 10 years ago. I guess users don't back that knowledge up with action by switching browsers.
- izacus 9y agoI'm sure losing the only advantage over technically superior Chrome is going to help their market share!
- sp332 9y agoLosing a major technical disadvantage will probably help.
- khana 9y agoBad news.
- lngnmn 9y agoThat would be a public relations suicide! Greed and monetization of user's data - this is the only real business model which brings profit. There is, probably, already a long queue of customers willing to pay for the data. And, of course, "anonymity" is nonsense. The whole point of collecting data is to classify users into target groups and model user's behavior. In other words - to collect the data for machine learning algorithms and sell access to the datasets and other services.
- lasermike026 9y agoIdea, pay people for their anonymized data. It's opt-in with an incentive.
- spurlock 9y agoDoes anyone know why Firefox always phones home to: somerandomserver.compute.amazonaws.com I have a tool called TCPView (a Microsoft sysinternals tool) that inspects my traffic. I disabled all the Mozilla telemetry and it still phones home to this server. The connection is encrypted going through port 443. It even appears in different forks of Firefox like Waterfox. Is this unique to me, or does anyone else notice this? My best guess is that it's some sort of telemetry they're collecting. Keep in mind I disabled updates so it's not pinging update servers either. Also: It happens only when I visit a website, and doesn't appear when I start up the browser for the first time. I also have no plugins installed. Since I see some Mozillians in this thread I figured it's the best place to ask!
- dhimes 9y agoI generally trust Mozilla, but I really don't understand what they are going to get out of the data. Their explanation leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps it's simply because I don't work on browsers? How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't. And- ditto for "Jank" (not sure I understand that term, frankly- why is it capitalized?). Some developers don't optimize well- how is Mozilla going to use this? I think they do a good job over on MDN. I guess I'd like to be sure I understand what problem they are trying to solve. Maybe they feel like without understanding their users they can't keep up with Chrome. I see people talking about how good Chrome is. And I must admit- it is sweet for me too. But that may be because (1) I don't have it loaded up with add-ons like I do Mozilla and (2) they have optimized for certain sites like youtube and gmail and I just can't get Firefox to work all that well on those sites. But I'm not convinced that they need my data to fix that. EDIT: On the other hand, Chrome seems to lose my passwords on every upgrade so it won't be my main browser until if fixes that little issue, which is going on, what, 5 years now?
- mccr8 9y ago> How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't. I'm not saying I support this proposal or not, but here's an example of why this could be useful: Chrome was considering deprecating some API, because it wasn't supported by other browsers and they didn't think that it was used very much. They collected generic statistics about how much it was used, but the numbers turned out to be much higher than expected, so they were considering leaving it alone. What if some fairly popular website they just hadn't heard of used the API? You might not want to break it, or at least you'd want to get in touch with the site to see if they could move to a more widely supported API. In the end, they somehow (maybe through spidering, or somebody just happened across it in their own browsing) figured out that the high usage was due to being used by some ad network for fingerprinting. Not only was this not a reason to keep supporting the API, it was a reason to stop supporting it!
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- dagenleg 9y agoIn the end Mozilla is simply going to go through with it and there's nothing we can do about it. Just like with the killing of the XUL plugins - the company simply didn't care about the outcry. I mean why would they? The amount of people that cares about stuff like 'customization' or 'privacy' is slim. So we will toothlessly complain but then the changes will be shoved in our throats, because obviously why would one care what the non-targeted demographics whines about. And of course it will be framed as being 'for our own good' and half of the people complaining with just deal with it, just like the majority already does.
- yborg 9y agoThe good news is that the project remains open source. The upcoming XULpocalypse already was set to make the existing Firefox forks permanent, so those of us that care will be moving to one of these anyway. Presumably these will not contain telemetry code.
- codedokode 9y agoI don't really understand why it is necessary? Cannot they just take top 100 sites from a rating like Alexa? And if they want to evaluate the performace, they could buy a cheap Celeron or Atom-based laptop with Windows and browse those top 100 sites. I am sure that this will give more information than any statistics.
- hellbanner 9y agoHow does Mozilla earn $?
- liminal 9y agoThis is great. A principled well-considered approach to collecting useful information in a way that respects people's privacy. Go Mozilla!
- stutonk 9y agoJust want to add a little volume to the general opinion here that collecting user data, no matter how anonymous, is a terrible idea for a product whose only appealing quality is that it respects its users privacy. Data is both highly alluring and addictive as evinced here by Mozilla potentially willing to shoot itself in the foot to get some. What's to keep this from becoming a frog in a boiling water kind of situation? How can I trust that Mozilla is going to adhere to their own stated standards? The easiest answer is that I won't have to because I can just use something else. Personally, the only reason I use Firefox is because it's slightly less convenient to set up a secruity-patched version of Chromium. Other people in this thread have made the excellent points of the fact that not enough people opting in to data collection is in itself a critical piece of data. Moreover, things such as "Which top sites are users visiting?" can be answered by looking at data from page ranking services and then they can go to those sites on their own testing equipment to answer their other questions. A little investment in acquiring this data by not spying and maybe getting a wider array of testing equipment is probably less costly than the potential for loss in market share that they're already struggling to hold.
- staticelf 9y agoIf they do this, I will uninstall Firefox and start recommending some other browser. Mozilla has really sunk in my eyes the last couple of years but this is the final spike in the coffin for me.
- morganvachon 9y agoWhat else is there, though, at least for mainstream users? There's Chrome which has been doing this since the beginning for Google, there's Safari but only if you're on a Mac, and there's a smattering of smaller browser projects on Linux that are good in their own right but not mainstream enough to have the features of the big four. On Windows, Microsoft Edge is of course a lean and capable browser, but the OS itself is also collecting telemetry on you at all times, including browsing habits. Hopefully someone will fork Firefox for Windows/Mac/'nix and strip out all the telemetry and data gathering bits, otherwise there's not much choice left for a privacy focused, full featured, fully supported browser on all platforms.
- staticelf 9y agoMost likely Brave, Edge, Opera or Vivaldi. I haven't really dug into if they do telemetry but some quick google searches tells me that at least Vivaldi does not. Brave is also a browser all about privacy so it would be weird if they do spy on their users. But you are correct, if Firefox falls as the last bastion in the web browser world to protect users privacy there is little choice left of really nice browsers. If / when Firefox does this however there is really no real reason to even pick Firefox to begin with since all the other major players do the same.
- morganvachon 9y agoBrave sounded interesting until I saw this at the bottom of the landing page: "Brave makes money by taking 5% of any donations and -- after it is fully implemented -- a small cut of advertising that is placed. Brave even shares some revenue with you -- at least as much as we receive." Then there's this: https://brave.com/about-ad-replacement/ https://brave.com/about-ad-replacement/ If they are planning to inject ads into the browser and somehow pay their users a kickback, how do they expect to maintain a reputation as a privacy focused project? Even if they offer to pay in cryptocurrency, they are still tying browsing habits and targeted advertisements to a trackable user. No thanks. I had switched from Chromium back to Firefox after Google was caught injecting binary blobs into Chromium at build time[1], and so last year when I decided to drop all Google products from my life, I already had a great (if slow) browser making it less of a hurdle. Now, though, I think I'll stick with Safari on my phone and Mac, and find a way to sync bookmarks from Safari to Midori on my other systems. [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909
- hellbanner 9y agoWhat's your favorite open-source browser?
- calcifer 9y agoCan we at least stop with the FUD please? > DRM EME is not DRM, it's a fully open source spec to support third-party DRM modules. If you don't actively choose to install a DRM module, there is no DRM in your Firefox. > 3-rd party apps Like what? Pocket is fully owned by Mozilla. > analytics, tracking So far this has been 100% opt-in. It might change with this new thing, but even that's not for certain.
- gbuk2013 9y ago> Can we at least stop with the FUD please? Can we please stop with using the word FUD for things that are not? The very idea of accepting DRM as a possibility in the browser was a slap in the face to those who believe in internet freedom. > Like what? Pocket is fully owned by Mozilla. Check your facts: it was added to FF 1.5 years before Mozilla bought it. It was an example of them just not giving a shit and adding it anyway. > So far this has been 100% opt-in. Check your facts: the Google Analytics in the extensions page that I linked is explicitly "opt-out" and even that happened only because people found out about it and (rightly) raised a stink. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14 (And really, of all the analytics choices, they fucking picked Google Analytics?!)
- Spivak 9y agoApparently Mozilla has a special deal with Google regarding their use of Analytics but it really doesn't make it that much better.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoSo freedom is not having the choice to use DRM?
- gbuk2013 9y agoI don't buy that argument, sorry. Because it requires something as anti-freedom as DRM to exist in the first place.
- unethical_ban 9y agoI am ashamed of the general "sky is falling" tone in this thread. I'm a privacy advocate. I know I'm not a fan of submitting gmy browser history (even domain-only) to another organization. Mozilla has always been the most privacy- and user-focused browser, and I think that history should be taken into consideration before the sky falls. People are insulting the developers, saying Chinese owned, VPN-operating Opera would be better for privacy... there is a lot of nonsense here. IMO this is not the most needed feature, and I would be happy for Firefox to keep in mind its reputation as a product focused on user privacy.
- throw2016 9y agoWhy is Firefox hellbent in reducing any advantage it has over Chrome and becoming an unnecessary clone. Who runs Mozilla, do they understand why anyone would choose Firefox over Chrome? Maybe it's time to put a spotlight on the management and decision making structures of increasingly important open source projects like Firefox to ensure they are being run in the public interest.
- Mystrl 9y agoBecause firefox as it is now is slowly dying. It looks like data collection is such a huge advantage that anyone not doing it is doomed in the long term.
- throwaway725494 9y agoDoes anyone know why Firefox always phones home to: firefox.exe 3588 TCP pc-name 49172 ec2-35-167-184-4.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com https ESTABLISHED 3 667 5 3,334 I have a tool called TCPView (a Microsoft sysinternals tool) that inspects my traffic. I disabled all the Mozilla telemetry and it still phones home to this server. The connection is encrypted going through port 443. It even appears in different forks of Firefox like Waterfox. Is this unique to me, or does anyone else notice this? My best guess is that it's some sort of telemetry they're collecting. Keep in mind I disabled updates so it's not pinging update servers either. Also: It happens only when I visit a website, and doesn't appear when I start up the browser for the first time. I also have no plugins installed. Since I see some Mozillians in this thread I figured it's the best place to ask!
- GrayShade 9y agoI tried to be unbiased in the submission title and it's probably late enough that this will be buried, but here are some my thoughts: > They don't plan on collecting URLs, just (eTLD+1). This is true as of right now, but can change at any time in the future. From the post: > What we plan to do now is run an opt-out SHIELD study [6] to validate our implementation of RAPPOR. This study will collect the value for users’ home page (eTLD+1) for a randomly selected group of our release population This test consists of collecting domains, indeed, but that doesn't say anything about what will happen in the future. > Note: "planning" means "reaching out for feedback about". Planning means planning. Today they're reaching for feedback, and the plans might change or not. > Hello, Redditors... This is my fault, I suppose, for posting the link here :). Many of the angry comments are uninformed, but the users, educated or not, are stakeholders here and Mozilla should be prepared for the fallout. There have been situations in the past (Pocket, Google Analytics) where well-formulated feedback from users was raedily dismissed. > One recurring ask from the Firefox product teams is the ability to collect more sensitive data, like top sites users visit and how features perform on specific sites. Currently we can collect this data when the user opts in [...]. Does anyone know what this is about? Telemetry? Because I will disable it if so. > Allow Firefox to install and run studies This is from the Nightly settings page but is pointing to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield, which doesn't exist (yet?). For anyone interested, there's a wiki page about them https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies. > What we plan to do now is run an opt-out SHIELD study [6] to validate our implementation of RAPPOR. This still sounds bad enough to forever poison "SHIELD" for me. It's also terribly named because it doesn't "protect" anyone. > No telemetry, no data collection. Without telemetry it would be almost impossible for the developers to figure out what works or not, and what's fast or not in Firefox. There's a whole spectrum here from "no telemetry" to "creepy". Please don't ignore this. > Now they are killing Privacy. Please try to get informed. A Mozilla employee in this thread (alexrs95) posted a series of tweets about what's being proposed: https://twitter.com/Alexrs95/status/896366072240144385 https://twitter.com/Alexrs95/status/896366072240144385. It's short enough, so please read at least that before complaining. > What's your favorite open-source browser? Firefox :). > I've removed all URLs from about:config and replaced them with localhost (search for "http"). This should help with privacy-related issues as long as no API endpoint is hardcoded. Beware of SHIELD, as Mozilla may still have the ability to push extensions to the browser. > He said there are math theorem to prove that it's sufficiently anonymize. I've not dug deep enough into the RAPPOR paper, but they do consider in passing the possibility of an attacker that has access to all of the collected data (think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter). > Everyone else Please be kind. EDIT: Looks like this post might have been pushed back from the front page by a moderator. I'm not sure I'm fine with that.
- FlyingLawnmower 9y agoI am surprised that there is such a fundamental misunderstanding of differential privacy on the Hacker News crowd. Meeting the standard of true differential privacy is one of the strongest known unconditional privacy guarantees. It will prevent Mozilla from being able to answer any user specific questions. For example, they might have an accurate count of how many people visit Google.com (say 60% of their user base), but they will be mathematically unable to point to exactly which 60% visited the site. Differential privacy in the RAPPOR implementation is peer reviewed and well understood. We can also review the actual code that ships in Firefox, which is a big plus over the Chrome implementation. There are some caveats -- what epsilon are they setting, are they adding an appropriate amount of noise, how do they protect against repeated queries, etc. but all of these can and will be reviewed by the differential privacy community. I am not affiliated with Mozilla or Google, though I do work in the field of differential privacy. On mobile now, but I am happy to provide links or answer questions to people who might have any when I am back at a laptop.
- devotedtoneu 9y agoI'm surprised at how difficult it is for certain posters in this thread to recognize the following about our behavior and device usage: More Data Collection < Less Data Collection
- GrayShade 9y agoI only skimmed the RAPPOR paper, but can you discuss the worst-case scenario where an NSA-like adversary is able to each data point when it arrives? Assuming this happens from the start, how much information would she be be able to obtain? > We can also review the actual code that ships in Firefox, which is a big plus over the Chrome implementation. Sure, but note that it's been implemented already and will be pushed to the users as an add-on, without going through the full release process. Even this HN post seems to have been prematurely buried. It would have been possible for this to be deployed without anyone knowing. Post-hoc reviewing of functionality as sensitive as this is not the ideal solution.
- godelski 9y agoWouldn't an easy solution be to just give a right click function that says "bug on this page"? You get a nice and easy way to the user to report a page and you are non-intrusive. If you're concerned with what pages users visit the most, why not just check Alexa ratings?
- frankmcsherry 9y agoAs someone familiar with differential privacy, and (somewhat less) with privacy generally, here are some suggestions for Mozilla: 1. Run an opt-out SHIELD study to answer the question: "how many people can find an 'opt-out' button?". That's all. You launch this at people with as much notice as you would plan on doing for RAPPOR, and see if you get a 100% response rate. If you do not, then 100% - whatever you get are going to be collateral damage should you launch DP as opt-out, and you need to own up to saying "well !@#$ them". 2. Implement RAPPOR and then do it OPT-IN. Run three levels of telemetry: (i) default: none, (ii) opt-in: RAPPOR, (iii) opt-in: full reports. Make people want to contribute, rather than trying to yank what they (quite clearly) feel is theirs to keep. Explain how their contribution helps, and that opting-in could be a great non-financial way to contribute. If you give a shit about privacy, work the carrot rather than the stick. 3. Name some technical experts you have consulted. Like, on anything about DP. The tweet stream your intern sent out had several historical and technical errors, and it would scare the shit out of me if they were the one doing this. 4. Name the lifetime epsilon you are considering. If it is 0.1, put in plain language that failing to opt out could disadvantage anyone by 10% on any future transaction in their life. I think the better experiment that is going on here is the trial run of "we would like to take advantage of privacy tech, but we don't know how". I think there are a lot of people who might like to help you on that (not me), and I hope you have learned about how to do it better.
- JoshMnem 9y agoNormally, I would vote for opt-in only, but I think that it could be opt-out for Firefox as long as there are no dark patterns that make it difficult to opt-out. The survival of Firefox is extremely important for the future of the Web. If it is opt-out, then Mozilla would have to be extremely open about how to opt-out and exactly what is tracked.
- binaryapparatus 9y agoThanks firefox. Not. One of the last truly shiny examples of open source is losing the plot. Not only that it requires pulseaudio (alsa?), it is getting harder and harder to use it normally with FreeBSD. Now this. I've had enough, testing links -g and it works well for most of my browsing needs.
- debdrup 9y agoMay I suggest w3m-img, tmux and uxrvt compiled with mouse support?
- tunap 9y agoHey Dang, HN mods! With the 300+ upvotes and active discussion still occurring at hour 7 since posting, care to explain how the algorithm has relegated this discussion to the fourth page and is still dropping? Is the much less active, day old posting of a SF author's death more heavily weighted than an inconvenient topic that is important to several more factors of readers?
- grzm 9y agoYou can search HN for other comments from the mods regarding the algorithm, but the short answer is that ranking is not a simple, transparent algorithm, nor is it independent of mod input. Ranking is dependent on time, commenting rate, user upvotes and flags (which don't result in a '[flagged]' tag until a threshold is reached), as well as mod input. Too much commenting activity can trigger the "overheated discussion detector", which can push a post down. Given that this has 213 upvotes and 319 comments (at the time of this posting), I'd say the latter is likely, though it's hard to say. In my experience, the quickest, most reliable way to contact the mods is via the Contact link in the footer. You might want to try that as well if you're looking for an expedient response.
- tunap 9y agoThanks for response, grzm. Considering neither of Mozilla's recent gaffe postings appear in the 400+ 'recent' list today, I will forgo contributions to the site. Open info != cloistered nor censored. YC has interests to protect after all the market speak and spurious posturing is washed away. I will miss the less controversial content, but my clicks & data history seem to be my only vote that matters anymore.
- sillyrat 9y agoI'm amazed that no one in this thread has yet mentioned Waterfox as an alternative - it uses Firefox as a base and then strips out telemetry, "pocket", and more: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
- bugmen0t 9y agoThe linked paper to RAPPOR is really, really noteworthy here. In essence, Firefox will ask itself whether it visited website X and flip a coin and if it's heads, it will lie to the server and send a random boolean. If it's tail, it will not. This way there is no way for anyone (including Mozilla) to know whether you actually visited the website. But the statistics will work out such that the collective data from everyone will give a good representation of all users. I find this a neat technology to collect data in a privacy-preserving way. And there's an opt-out (opt-in won't work because it creates bias and provides messy results). I really, honestly don't understand why people are so upset.
- lepouet 9y agoWell, if it's really needed, why not.
- nonbel 9y agoLet's be honest here. In many people's opinion (including my own) firefox has gotten worse since they started all this telemetry stuff. Supporting this, marketshare has also been dropping. So, I don't think they know how to properly interpret the data they are getting. Either that or the data is so messy as to be worse than useless.
- Animats 9y agoMozilla: you do not have a need to know for that information.
- z3t4 9y agoIn the latest version of Firefox on Windows it calls home when exiting and visiting certain web sites (flash maybe?). I did not opt in for anything.
- Paul-ish 9y agoWhat impact will this have on bandwidth?
- occamrazor 9y agoWhy opt-out? I understand that if the users have to make an effort to submit telemetry data, most won't. But it could be a dialog at update/installation time, wich requires the user to choose between yes amd no. If a users says no, they clearly value their privacy more than additional features or stability of their browser, and Mozilla's values include respect of the users' choices about their own data.
- a3_nm 9y agoIf you do not like the idea that by default Firefox will send data to Mozilla about your Firefox usage (no matter the privacy protection techniques being used), you should probably be aware that Firefox is already sending this kind of data to Mozilla. This is called Firefox Health Report and is pointed out in their privacy policy: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report FHR is also opt-out, i.e., enabled by default. If you do not like this, you may want to disable this as well.
- kxyvr 9y agoI'll also contend this is a disturbing, terrible idea. I design optimization algorithms and software professionally and the majority of that software is released open source. Now, does my software likely run terribly on some problems that my users give it? Absolutely. That probably costs me business because they get frustrated, give up, and go somewhere else. And, to combat that, I could absolutely engineering my libraries to send anonymized information about their problem structure back to my company. Certainly, it would help me improve my software and algorithms. I also view it as horribly unethical, a breach of my customers trust, and an unacceptable course of action. Look, I want my software to work well for everyone, but it's part of my job to figure out when things don't well and fix that beyond scraping information about my customers uses automatically. I contend this is a terrible idea and very much would like Mozilla to abandon it.
- lucideer 9y agoFrom a technical perspective, I'm not quite so bothered by what data Mozilla collects about me, how often, &c. I'm happy to opt-in to Telemetry and don't mind if it's extremely "comprehensive" in what it measures. The real issue here is with ethos and perspective. I use Firefox because the ethos of the company and its employees, and their general "take" on issues like this allows (or has allowed) me a general sense of trust in them. Even the very existence of this discussion erodes that trust. This says to me "the people making this browser don't understand the importance of consent, and have a vastly different perspective on the value of privacy to mine". If your developers need more data from Telemetry, get consent and collect more data. Establish trust in users in what you do with that data.
- t49261 9y agoWhy is this proposal hosted on Mozilla's main competitor's discussion platform? That seems unprofessional at best, an irrational blind spot of the corporation that is decimating their market share with dubious marketing and monopolistic practices. Isn't an organization the size of Mozilla able to host policy discussions on one of their own domains? What are people who do not use Google products supposed to do? By now people should be aware that it is not just the content that is important, but also the metadata. A browser that phones home with information on users' browsing habits is not acceptable to many of us, who will move to forks or a different browser altogether. This from one of the people who "doesn't complain, but just never goes back."