I wonder why Mozilla is lately so fond of collecting user data. Do they have a new data mining department which is looking for work? Did someone tell them to do

I wonder why Mozilla is lately so fond of collecting user data. Do they have a new data mining department which is looking for work? Did someone tell them to do data driven development/marketing? If they really want to know more about what we are doing, they could just ask us, don't they? I mean, something like building a FF extension which offers to participate in a monthly survey and at the end of each survey it can ask which data the user wants to attach to his survey responses this one time. And if they ask the users for all hosts they have visited during the last month, many people will ask what Mozilla wants to do with that data and Mozilla can explain their intent so that everybody can decide if he wants to support that cause. Yes, that would probably yield much less data and would be more cumbersome for Mozilla, but in the end it would be a fair way of letting your users participate in the development process. As users we want a product which we can trust 100% that it will keep our data on our computer as long as we don't explicitly say otherwise.