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"These are used by Mozilla to spy on you, and are as such a significant risk to privacy." Wow that's a big claim. Any proofs that the data collected is not ano
by quiquex 9y ago
"These are used by Mozilla to spy on you, and are as such a significant risk to privacy."
Wow that's a big claim. Any proofs that the data collected is not anonymous?
It sounds a lot like fear-mongering
- stonogo 9y agoIt's not on us to prove it's not anonymous. It's on Mozilla to prove it is.
- ______53 9y agoI believe you can see the data that's being sent by typing about:telemetry in the address bar.
- st3fan 9y agoOr you can put a sniffer on the line, or read the source code, or read the code for the receiving end. Or .. just talk to someone on the team and ask questions. Mozilla is incredibly open and transparent. Anyone can even join team/product meetings on video chat.
- cinquemb 9y ago>…or read the source code… Good idea: Step #1: read modules/libpref/Preferences.cpp Step #2: default all function calls to `PREF_SetBoolPref` for `kTelemetryPref` with args true to false; remove all `PREF_LockPref` calls with kTelemetryPref Step #3: ./mach build
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 9y agoFor a datum to be mathematically anonymous means that there is a proof that no function exists which maps instances of that datum to identities more reliably than a random guess. A datum isn't anonymous unless proven otherwise. Today's "practically anonymous" is tomorrow's "deanonymized".
- outworlder 9y agoYeah. Companies should be transparent about the data they collect and how they anonymize it – and should be easily disabled if needed if you need serious privacy, as is possible that some resourceful actor could de-anonymize the information somehow. But this kind of data is not necessarily harmful. People disabling telemetry will often be the same ones complaining about "poorly written applications and company X should know better". Well they don't because you disabled telemetry, now the company or organization has no data to improve anything, be it performance, crashes or even UI. Bug reports are not enough.
- inferiorhuman 9y ago> Well they don't because you disabled telemetry, now the company or organization has no data to improve anything No.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoYet organizations went decades making fantastic and ever-improving software without telemetry. What changed? Why would telemetry suddenly become a basic requirement for improvement?
- SquareWheel 9y agoAnd another thing -- what's the deal with automobiles? Horses do a perfectly fine job at getting us around.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 9y agoAlways raise uncertainty.
- yuhong 9y agoEspecially when it is open source.
- yorby 9y agoit's very hard to completely anonymize data... companies have so much data nowadays that they can de-anonymize it more easily.
- gsich 9y agoYou send them data. Now they have your IP. You don't know if it gets deleted.
- st3fan 9y agoAFAIK We throw IP addresses away pretty quickly after receiving a telemetry packet. You can read about our data collection approval process here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection An IP address would be Category 4 - I think it is pretty much impossible to get approval for category 4. I highly doubt we have any products out there that actually collect Category 4 data.
- userbinator 9y agoDo your webservers really not have any logging? By default they all do. I've accepted it as a given that if I interact with a website, it will know my IP, but "phoning home" is a slightly different matter.
- gsich 9y agoThe problem hereby is that nobody can actually verify this. But this is true for all companies/servers you don't control.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoPerhaps a little melodramatic of a statement by the gist author. But the point is these settings are insecure by default. Exploitable by Mozilla, and perhaps by third parties.
- ekianjo 9y agoThey should not be collecting data by default anyway.
- qbaqbaqba 9y agoI would rather expect the one collecting the data to prove that they are anonymous. And MetaData anyway? In many countries they may be used without a court order. A false sense of security is the worst.