5 ms·

While nice for supporting the development of Firefox, it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience. As far as I understand, disabling it is also not a

by gnode 7y ago

While nice for supporting the development of Firefox, it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience. As far as I understand, disabling it is also not a data point by which you could be fingerprinted. You're taking it for granted that the reported data is adequately anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science. As mentioned later in the article, Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be.

vinylkey 7y ago
> You're taking it on trust that it's anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science. I don't doubt that someone at Mozilla could de-anonymize that data, but I have enough trust in the organization that they won't
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  So, you trust that the key people at Mozilla will go to jail rather than de-anonymize your data?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Have a look through about:telemetry and let us know what you think the US government thinks is so valuable they would threaten powerful people with jail time to find out. Whether my CPU has MMX? Maybe times so far in this session there was auto-starting audio playback which you allowed even though Firefox defaults to never allowing this? I can /maybe/ if I squint really hard, imagine some murder detective figuring out a way that a value in their suspect's telemetry data helps prove they did it. Only thing is, the murder cop can just ask a judge to let them go take the suspect's whole PC, no need to bother any Mozilla employees with crazy requests.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      You are aware that it is publicly known that the US government has been practicing a "collect anything you can get your hands on about everyone" approach for a while now, right?
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        So your theory is that the US government's policy is to find the most convoluted difficult way to do this collecting and ignore all the easier ways? "Boss, I just got done with that $500Bn compute job to work out a guy's password as you recommended, rather than just resetting it by email as I'd originally thought of doing. As you pointed out the government can just raise income taxes to pay for it" "Cool, OK, now I want you to go threaten this company CEO. They collect optional telemetry data and we'd like to extort that CEO into telling us whether a user with this IP address has an Intel or AMD processor" "Shouldn't I just get them to export the data from their software directly rather than bother with all this? Or just use any of these broadly available malware techniques to get the answer for the user we care about?" "No, that would be simpler and cheaper, if we do it this way only a true genius like zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC would realise what we're up to, as ever our goal is collect anything but only in the most elaborate way possible so that it's tremendously expensive and difficult" "OK, but what if the user has disabled telemetry?" "Then we'll have to think of an even more expensive and elaborate way to collect data. We have a programme to teach goldfish to swim differently depending on whether they have recently seen anybody wearing a T-shirt with a specific logo design on it."
- gnode 7y ago
  As I stated in the last paragraph of my comment: > Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be. Even if Mozilla are completely trustworthy, nothing is stopping them from being forced to give up all that data with a national security letter (accompanied with the customary gag order), to be mined for insights by alphabet agencies.
  - dralley 7y ago
    What insights would alphabet agencies hope to gain from detailed statistics on page load times?
nikbackm 7y ago
As long as the telemetry does not include the URLs you visit, how sensitive could it be?
- user9361 7y ago
  Are you in a $3000 Macbook or on a $500 Windows PC? Linux? Power user maybe? And so on...
  - gruez 7y ago
    Okay, so we know that there's a 2017 MBP running firefox with IP 172.16.23.xx, and the users uses features a, b, c with frequencies x, y, z respectively. How can this be nefariously used?
staktrace 7y ago
> it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience It increases the chances that Firefox developers address performance and other problems that are affecting you. If you disable telemetry, your problems "don't count" when doing data-driven prioritization of development work. (note: I'm a Mozilla employee, working on gecko)
- gruez 7y ago
  Concrete example of this: Mozilla removing RSS support because "[it has] outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage"[1]. I suspect that there's a high correlation between "power users" that used RSS and went through the settings to disable telemetry. [1] https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It would hardly matter because such users are probably still, and always were, an absolute minority of Firefox users and, more importantly, data-driven design often assumes equality of users unless somebody has gone out of their way to justify violating that assumption. And the easiest/most common way to violate the assumption of user equality is to point at other data, such as "only 1% use that feature but 50% of those that do are whales who account for 90% of our income." But when the matter is less concrete because the value of one particular minority demographic is hard to pin down in the collected data (from what in the mozilla's telemetry data can you persuasively derive the value of power users who tell their friends and family to use firefox? Uncovering those relationships would certainly violate users' privacy..) then "data driven" decision processes will by default assume all users have equal worth.
  - dralley 7y ago
    There are addons for RSS support that are much higher quality than the built-in support.
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    Another big example is Linux. If you ever wonder why developers don't bother to support your Linux distro, try turning on telemetry once in a while. It'll help.
tialaramex 7y ago
> it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely. For example, TLS 1.0 (and 1.1) is deprecated and will be disabled by mutual agreement among browser vendors in 2020. On the road there, Firefox are watching their telemetry to determine how many users are affected and how much effort it's appropriate to put into mitigating difficulties for those who have systems that can't be upgraded. For me this will go fine, I don't have any systems that aren't capable of TLS 1.2 and very few that can't do TLS 1.3 so my telemetry data will show all is well. Maybe you are not so lucky. Too bad, you've disabled telemetry so nobody is coming to help. Bye.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely. Yours won't count double unless there are only two users, in which case decision makers will likely disregard telemetry data all together. You're right that the individual's usage pattern isn't directly considered, but for most users that won't matter because their usage patterns aren't uncommon. If you're one of a small group of users that do $weirdThing and that group is so small that your individual telemetry data contributes significantly, a) that group will likely be ignored and b) anonymizing is a problem you may not want to be involved in as a user.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Yeah, I don't really buy that telemetry is actually guiding design in the first place. Rather, I wager telemetry most often gets used to create post-hoc rationalizations for changes somebody already has their heart set on. And if the most relevant statistic plainly doesn't support the change, then a less obvious statistic is found instead and said to be more important (e.g. "telemetry says 85% of our users use this feature.... but telemetry also says that 90% of users close the application within five minutes of using this feature every time they use it, so users might think they like this feature but actually they're wrong and it drives down user engagement.") I've not worked at Mozilla, but that's how I've seen it happen just about every time I ever saw telemetry get cited in situations I had some insider insight into.

by gnode 7y ago

vinylkey 7y ago

> You're taking it on trust that it's anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science. I don't doubt that someone at Mozilla could de-anonymize that data, but I have enough trust in the organization that they won't

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
So, you trust that the key people at Mozilla will go to jail rather than de-anonymize your data?
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Have a look through about:telemetry and let us know what you think the US government thinks is so valuable they would threaten powerful people with jail time to find out. Whether my CPU has MMX? Maybe times so far in this session there was auto-starting audio playback which you allowed even though Firefox defaults to never allowing this? I can /maybe/ if I squint really hard, imagine some murder detective figuring out a way that a value in their suspect's telemetry data helps prove they did it. Only thing is, the murder cop can just ask a judge to let them go take the suspect's whole PC, no need to bother any Mozilla employees with crazy requests.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    You are aware that it is publicly known that the US government has been practicing a "collect anything you can get your hands on about everyone" approach for a while now, right?
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      So your theory is that the US government's policy is to find the most convoluted difficult way to do this collecting and ignore all the easier ways? "Boss, I just got done with that $500Bn compute job to work out a guy's password as you recommended, rather than just resetting it by email as I'd originally thought of doing. As you pointed out the government can just raise income taxes to pay for it" "Cool, OK, now I want you to go threaten this company CEO. They collect optional telemetry data and we'd like to extort that CEO into telling us whether a user with this IP address has an Intel or AMD processor" "Shouldn't I just get them to export the data from their software directly rather than bother with all this? Or just use any of these broadly available malware techniques to get the answer for the user we care about?" "No, that would be simpler and cheaper, if we do it this way only a true genius like zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC would realise what we're up to, as ever our goal is collect anything but only in the most elaborate way possible so that it's tremendously expensive and difficult" "OK, but what if the user has disabled telemetry?" "Then we'll have to think of an even more expensive and elaborate way to collect data. We have a programme to teach goldfish to swim differently depending on whether they have recently seen anybody wearing a T-shirt with a specific logo design on it."
gnode 7y ago
As I stated in the last paragraph of my comment: > Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be. Even if Mozilla are completely trustworthy, nothing is stopping them from being forced to give up all that data with a national security letter (accompanied with the customary gag order), to be mined for insights by alphabet agencies.
- dralley 7y ago
  What insights would alphabet agencies hope to gain from detailed statistics on page load times?

nikbackm 7y ago

As long as the telemetry does not include the URLs you visit, how sensitive could it be?

user9361 7y ago
Are you in a $3000 Macbook or on a $500 Windows PC? Linux? Power user maybe? And so on...
- gruez 7y ago
  Okay, so we know that there's a 2017 MBP running firefox with IP 172.16.23.xx, and the users uses features a, b, c with frequencies x, y, z respectively. How can this be nefariously used?

staktrace 7y ago

> it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience It increases the chances that Firefox developers address performance and other problems that are affecting you. If you disable telemetry, your problems "don't count" when doing data-driven prioritization of development work. (note: I'm a Mozilla employee, working on gecko)

gruez 7y ago
Concrete example of this: Mozilla removing RSS support because "[it has] outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage"[1]. I suspect that there's a high correlation between "power users" that used RSS and went through the settings to disable telemetry. [1] https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
- catalogia 7y ago
  It would hardly matter because such users are probably still, and always were, an absolute minority of Firefox users and, more importantly, data-driven design often assumes equality of users unless somebody has gone out of their way to justify violating that assumption. And the easiest/most common way to violate the assumption of user equality is to point at other data, such as "only 1% use that feature but 50% of those that do are whales who account for 90% of our income." But when the matter is less concrete because the value of one particular minority demographic is hard to pin down in the collected data (from what in the mozilla's telemetry data can you persuasively derive the value of power users who tell their friends and family to use firefox? Uncovering those relationships would certainly violate users' privacy..) then "data driven" decision processes will by default assume all users have equal worth.
- dralley 7y ago
  There are addons for RSS support that are much higher quality than the built-in support.
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  Another big example is Linux. If you ever wonder why developers don't bother to support your Linux distro, try turning on telemetry once in a while. It'll help.

tialaramex 7y ago

> it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely. For example, TLS 1.0 (and 1.1) is deprecated and will be disabled by mutual agreement among browser vendors in 2020. On the road there, Firefox are watching their telemetry to determine how many users are affected and how much effort it's appropriate to put into mitigating difficulties for those who have systems that can't be upgraded. For me this will go fine, I don't have any systems that aren't capable of TLS 1.2 and very few that can't do TLS 1.3 so my telemetry data will show all is well. Maybe you are not so lucky. Too bad, you've disabled telemetry so nobody is coming to help. Bye.

luckylion 7y ago
> Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely. Yours won't count double unless there are only two users, in which case decision makers will likely disregard telemetry data all together. You're right that the individual's usage pattern isn't directly considered, but for most users that won't matter because their usage patterns aren't uncommon. If you're one of a small group of users that do $weirdThing and that group is so small that your individual telemetry data contributes significantly, a) that group will likely be ignored and b) anonymizing is a problem you may not want to be involved in as a user.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't really buy that telemetry is actually guiding design in the first place. Rather, I wager telemetry most often gets used to create post-hoc rationalizations for changes somebody already has their heart set on. And if the most relevant statistic plainly doesn't support the change, then a less obvious statistic is found instead and said to be more important (e.g. "telemetry says 85% of our users use this feature.... but telemetry also says that 90% of users close the application within five minutes of using this feature every time they use it, so users might think they like this feature but actually they're wrong and it drives down user engagement.") I've not worked at Mozilla, but that's how I've seen it happen just about every time I ever saw telemetry get cited in situations I had some insider insight into.