29 ms·

Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

601 points by gslin 5y ago

pxeger1 5y ago
Is the current Mozilla CEO a plant by Google with the goal of driving Mozilla into the ground as much as possible? I don't understand how they can keep fucking up their business so badly.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  A download identifier really isn't that bad. Maybe they need to actually show some numbers of their downloads to justify budgets and other things. It's not like they are having tracking JavaScript on 80% of the worlds Web sites like someone else I know, starting with Googl...
  - paranoidrobot 5y ago
    Download counts dont need you to embed a unique token. At the most basic level, you can get this by doing a count over http logs.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      To tell how many downloads result in an actual install http logs are not enough. You will get extra noise on top of the data you care about.
      - paranoidrobot 5y ago
        Download to install conversion also doesn't need an embedded token. It could be obtained through other data that doesn't need to track the individual install. I forget if Firefox has a 'welcome' page that it shows on first launch, but it could serve as the count of number of installs. I believe Firefox also has an auto update system, so that too could serve as an Active Users count. Lots of ways that you can derive this data without needing to track individual download to installation.
        sdoering 5y ago
        Even if you do 'install' and 'first run' tracking without the unique identifier you need to have consent for EU citizens before sending the tracking request to Mozilla. As the IP is transmitted you would already be sending what the regulations call 'personal data'. The ID is just additional data that would probably be classified as PD (personal data) as well. So even basic install tracking is a no go. I also just don't understand why this would be necessary. This wasn't the case for software for how many decades? It didn't necessarily transmit such information. If it was commercial you probably had something like license server stuff in the later days (before just a number that was checked for validation). It probably became a thing when the mobile phone with app model rose. There the vendors (mostly Apple/Google) knew the downloads from the app stores and marketing wanted more. Especially when the pushed advertisements for apps. So companies like Adjust rose to fame for tracking ad clicks to installs, first run and usage stats. This probably led to others thinking it to be a great idea for general software as well.
- soundnote 5y ago
  "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    I love this comment. It feels like it gets at the heart of a frustration that is otherwise difficult to articulate. I have passed it around to all those I know (with credit) in the hope that it helps them, too, at least name what they are facing as they struggle through bureaucratic morasses.
- wubbert 5y ago
  Mozilla does get a lot of their funding from Google...
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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akselmo 5y ago
I would not download anything from Softonic. I know it's just an example but if you download anything from there you might get few surprises with the download.
- Ayesh 5y ago
  Agreed. Softonic for software is what Pinterest for images.
- hddqsb 5y ago
  Not just any example: Ghacks is owned by Softonic.
  - akselmo 5y ago
    Well that explains!
hosteur 5y ago
How is this not a blatant violation of EU GDPR? This is involuntary non informed tracking.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  My understanding of the GDPR is that it doesn't apply if the analytics are fully anonymized, and only partially applies if the analytics are pseudonymous[1]. It's exceedingly likely that one of these cases applies, since the ID in question is tied to a single Mozilla installation, not individual user or even browser profile. [1]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-students-and-researchers/practical-data-protection-guidance-notices/anonymisation-and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-student...
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    At the same time IP addresses have been ruled to be personal information. They very clearly don't uniquely identify a person, but are close enough that it doesn't matter as the GDPR is concerned. Unique identifiers in general are murky waters.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    It is PD (Personal Data). The same way an IP or any 'anonymous' identifier from web analytics is. So from my understanding of the GDPR regulations this is a clear violation.
- sdoering 5y ago
  I have just sent a complaint to the data protection officer responsible for me (of the German federal state in which I live). Let's see what happens (expectation: nothing).
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
I am sick, so sick at seeing all this bullshit that Mozilla is doing to my beloved browser. If this was a standalone issue, I probably wouldn't mind. But this one of a string of crap Mozilla has been doing.
IYasha 5y ago
400+ comments and nobody mentioned PaleMoon? Really?? I've been using it for a few years now, and for the most part it works well.
whatshisface 5y ago
Package manager installations wouldn't have this problem because everybody gets the same copy of the same binary and associated files, rights?
- pxeger1 5y ago
  Package manager installations are normally built from source by the distribution maintainers, not downloaded as binaries from the Mozilla website. So they wouldn't have any "download identifier", unique or not, in them.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Yes. Just like with the Audacity kerfuffle some time ago, it's not a problem for distro packages, only when you get your binaries from upstream.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Which is what 95% of users would do though.. the average user will use Windows or Mac and has never heard of Chocolatey. Firefox is not in the Mac app store and I guess not on Windows either.
    - PascLeRasc 5y ago
      Windows actually knows about the Firefox installer tracker and blocks it: https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-blocks-firefox-installer-says-itll-hurt-your-pc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-blocks-firefox...
    - 0xBAADA555 5y ago
      It is on the Windows Store. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/mozilla-firefox-browser/9nzvdkpmr9rd https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/mozilla-firefox-browser/9n...
- politelemon 5y ago
  Correct and it's just one of many reasons why checksums and signatures are so important in package managers. There's an automatic enforcement of privacy and integrity.
dmead 5y ago
Why?
gjsman-1000 5y ago
I hate WebKit and Blink's domination as much as anyone, but rather than put up a strong fight, Firefox is begging to lose. And unfortunately, I can't help but admit that Firefox deserves to lose (not just from this, but from other terrible decisions added up), even if the consequences of a web monoculture are terrible.
- noobermin 5y ago
  How much of the drama of the last three years can be laid squarely at the feet of the CEO who gave themselves a raise right when they laid off the MDN staff?
kbelder 5y ago
Firefox users who prefer to download the browser without the unique identifier may do so in the following two ways: Download the Firefox installer from Mozilla's HTTPS repository (formerly the FTP repository). Download Firefox from third-party download sites that host the installer, e.g., from Softonic. It's nuts and another indication Mozilla doesn't understand the reason they exist, but it's not that hard to get around... if you're one of the 0.1% that hears about this.
- deleted 5y ago
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- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  Use a reputable Linux distro and install from the official repos, problem solved. To date the Debian maintainers have proven more trustworthy than 99.99% of the software vendors out there. They also appear to have better security practices than most commercial shops.
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    That's a little difficult for 'official repo's that don't include ESR versions.
  - 5ESS 5y ago
    It’s a shame debian flushed their reputation down the drain recently.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Debian has a deliberate policy of extensively modifying upstream code, including security-critical code, without any dedicated security review. This (predictably) resulted in quite possibly the worst general-purpose software security bug of all time, where SSH and TLS keys generated on Debian machines were effectively blank and supposedly encrypted communications were readable by anyone. Debian has not changed its practices to prevent a reoccurrence and continues to follow the same policy. I agree that most Debian maintainers are trustworthy and have good intentions, but I would not consider them as having good security practices.
knodi 5y ago
wtf Mozilla, why are you making me stop using you?
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  As if there was any serious alternative that wasn't much worse.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    I mean if they both are going off the deep end for tracking chrome is faster and a ton of developers seem to only care if it works on chrome....
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      Well, Firefox' tracking is usually meant for determining things like where did the installer came from and collecting feature usage data, while Google's is all about building marketing profiles to sell targeted ads. You decide how bad each of them is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kaba0 5y ago
  How is it making you stop using it? Like, people can’t see the difference between “telemetry” done by supermarkets by counting an approximate number of visitors vs the full-on knowing your childhood best-friends’ secret crush on you. There is eons of difference between the two.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    It's the exact same thing. Doesn't matter why you're doing something wrong. The ends still don't justify the means.
freediver 5y ago
Zero telemetry is the only way to go for a modern browser with a sense of decency for the web and the users. I invite everyone on a Mac to try and support Orion browser - zero telemetry by default.
- minitech 5y ago
  Forgot to disclose your affiliation this time. This is embarrassing, by the way: > So forget user agent/screen resolution/OS masking and other marketing talk used by browsers - this was maybe a thing 15 years ago, if ever. This does not protect you against sophisticated fingerprinters on the web. > The only efficient protection against fingerprinting is what Orion is doing - preventing fingerprinter from running in the first place. Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with full first party and third party ad and tracking script blocker, built in by default, making sure invasive fingerprinters never run on the page.
  - freediver 5y ago
    > Forgot to disclose your affiliation this time. I feel I did it many times so that it is clear. Also I used "I invite you..." phrase. > This is embarrassing, by the way: Care to explain why you think so?
gjsman-1000 5y ago
How much R&D do you think Firefox squandered on making a custom installer generator for every download and being unable to cache the files on a cheap CDN?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Not much? I did exactly this when I worked on a really popular P2P file sharing client (at one point estimated to be installed on >15% of all PCs worldwide). It even improved our actual installs, but that is probably about just using an ultralight weight installer rather than having a tracking ID integrated into it. It literally took me a week. Granted, things were really fast and loose back then. It would probably take me 2 years and a team of engineers to do a similar thing at my current FANG job.
ordu 5y ago
They seem to be trying to gather a lot of telemetry to measure how they can boost popularity of Firefox. I wonder did they tried to measure how the measurement itself influences popularity? Social measurements are like quantum ones, they change reality. There was a funny story of a Hawthorn Experiment[1], which tried to find ways to boost productivity but at the end managed to state just that the very attempt to conduct an experiment boosts productivity. It seems to me that with Mozilla the effect has a opposite sign and any attempt to measure decreases the target variables of decision making. And therefore they need to find ways to measure "non-invasively", not to measure every little thing they can measure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- causality0 5y ago
  Well they've spent a decade trying the "be more like Chrome" method. I suggest they try the "be more like Firefox from when Firefox was successful" method.
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    Firefox was successful when it was the alternative, better, option to the dominant Internet Explorer. Now the dominant browser is Chrom(e|ium). The two scenarios are very different.
    - causality0 5y ago
      Precisely. Firefox is never going to defeat Chrome in the "being Chrome" category. If it wants to exist as more than a tool for Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits, it can't keep playing that game. It has to differentiate. Privacy is not differentiation because it's invisible and HN commentators are 90% of the people who care about it. I want the sense of power back. I want the feeling that Firefox gave me a decade ago that my browser behaved exactly the way I wanted it to and nothing about it ticked me off because if I didn't like it I could just change it. Nowadays using Firefox feels more like holding a political demonstration in an empty room than using the finely-tuned instrument I once had.
rkagerer 5y ago
How long has it been that way?
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497 Its from a year ago
lostgame 5y ago
Okay, first the stupid fucking ‘Turning Red’ advertisement that dared to call itself ‘adorable’, and now this? Seriously, does FireFox hate itself, or just hates it’s dwindling but loyal user base? We used to use Firefox because they didn’t do shit like this. I actually deleted Firefox after about 15 years of loyal use after the ‘Turning Red’ incident. Glad to hear I made the right call. I’ve been using Safari and have no regrets. Goodbye, Firefox. Good riddance, if this is how you’ll behave. It’s sad to watch the dream of a mainstream open-source browser that wasn’t evil vanish. We will need something else, but I don’t see huge potential adoption for anything. It was hard enough to get people to swap browsers in the 00’s, it’s gonna be way harder with each platform pushing its own pre-installed browser.
klntsky 5y ago
> This will allow us to track which installs result from which downloads to determine the answers to questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" What value does Mozilla see in being able to do that?
- cxr 5y ago
  The prevailing belief in the industry is that any problem can be solved with more data, dumpster-grade[1] though it may be. It's appealing to think that it can be used in lieu of just making thoughtful decisions. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532
- ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
  I have no idea what the actual answer is, but one can image that they want to understand where are people getting these copies of ff if they do not download them themselves. Why would this be important, again just speculating: to try to leverage whatever channel this might uncover to distribute even more copies of the browser. Is this ID thing the best way to do it, though? Probably.
  - noAnswer 5y ago
    > but one can image that they want to understand where are people getting these copies of ff if they do not download them themselves. These people are getting it obviously from their admins! (Like myself. I push Firefox updates to close to 1000 PCs. I thought (amongst other things) I'm doing them a favour by saving them traffic.) They obviously know that! The real reason they are doing this is simply because they started collecting data. Now they are hooked and constantly want more. That is all there is to it. They already identify each individual installation, so someone on the team said: Let's identify each download too.
    - detaro 5y ago
      > These people are getting it obviously from their admins! That's one possibility. And even if you pretend it's the only one, it's still interesting how that's distributed. Is it X admins of 1000-PC orgs, or X*500 people who also install it on dads PC? Count how often each token is used, and you got a histogram, and if you just record that you've not collected anything remotely sensitive about any user. This question can be answered extremely cleanly.
xnx 5y ago
This is late-stage Firefox behavior. Like Yahoo in 2012.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Remember what happened when Firefox OS died? It was forked into KaiOS, which has become a superior product that actually found a market. I will not mourn the death of Mozilla. When it collapses, may it be forked and turn into something decent by more competent leaders who don't give themselves multimillion dollar salaries and make pointless acquisitions.
- soundnote 5y ago
  But KaiOS is not a high status Cali techie project.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cf141q5325 5y ago
From the linked bugzilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 >One note, in case it's not already clear: The download token will be available in the telemetry environment, but all web session data that it is linked to will NOT ever be included in telemetry, it is being deliberately kept in a separate data set, and we will be limiting access to the ability to join these data sets to a small set of people. Small set of people? Pls do tell me more
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  This is very alarming. If web session data will never be included in telemetry, why do some people have to ability to query joins? That means it can happen. Why does this small set of people need to access my web session data? I don't use Firefox regularly, but I have it installed on my computers. I think I'm going to uninstall it completely. This stuff has become more and more common, and is totally unacceptable.
- xtanx 5y ago
  > Approval granted by Privacy. Good to go. Great job there "Privacy"...
  - grey_earthling 5y ago
    This is an example of where openness — which Mozilla used to excel at — would have helped. If there was a detailed rationale considering the potential privacy impact of this change, publicly available, then we'd be able to see that Mozilla did indeed thoughtfully weigh up the consequences of doing this. We may disagree with the decision, but at least we'd be able to see the set of underlying assumptions and point to which one we think is wrong, and perhaps provide evidence to show it's mistaken — constructive feedback. But as it is, we just have an opaque assertion that “this is fine”.
- josefx 5y ago
  > Small set of people? The entirety of the US government most likely, any hacker that manages to get onto Mozillas servers, every spy agency worth its money, if its choice of research partners has something to say everyone at Meta. So in total maybe a bit bellow a million people. So really just a handful of trusted people.
blibble 5y ago
how does this get through the MS smartscreen and authenticode checks?
- laurent123456 5y ago
  As long as the executable is signed (and it must be), and the company well known, Windows should be fine with it.
- dataflow 5y ago
  In fact this is how you get past SmartScreen checks. Windows freaks out a lot more when it sees the same file being downloaded by lots of people, but if you make them all different, then it calms down.
- eps 5y ago
  There is a way to add random data to signed executables without invalidating the sig. Data, not code. Smartscreen is bypassed by using EV sig, which gives the exe an instant reputation boost.
  - blex 5y ago
    Would you have documentation about this? Where can random bytes be added to a signed exe without invalidating the sig?
- blex 5y ago
  Yes, how does the .exe keep its valid digital signature if the hash of the .exe is modified for each person? Would someone have documentation about which bytes we can modify in a code-signed .exe without making the digital signature invalid? In the case it's not possible, does this mean Mozilla generates a new .exe on the fly + codesigns the .exe on the fly for each new download?
bradyd 5y ago
From the dltoken_data_review.md [1]: >> 9) If this data collection is default on, what is the opt-out mechanism for users? >> Standard Telemetry Opt-Out If you haven't installed it yet, how can you use the standard telemetry opt-out? [1] https://bug1677497.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9195911 https://bug1677497.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9195...
mindslight 5y ago
IMO as market optimization turns the screws ever harder, the escape hatch is to head towards source distributions. Outrage articles are only necessary because people have come to rely on these monolithic binary downloads with their "channels" and "installers" and "auto updaters", that are gatekept by centralized entities like Mozilla. Whereas if say the source tarball used by Nix is engaging in similar shenanigans, that is fixable with a self-applied patch rather than needing to convince Mozilla to change.
gandalfff 5y ago
I don't really understand telemetry. How is Google Analytics helping them to improve the browser? Is it to see which features are actually being used?
- emerged 5y ago
  They ignore their users in all other aspects so it seems unlikely to be driven by that.
- brimble 5y ago
  Imagine you could stick a camera over your users' shoulders, mostly without them knowing you're doing it, instead of doing actual user research. That's what the stuff's for. Some of the tools for these things record entire sessions, including mouse movements. It's creepy as hell and even the tamest of "telemetry" 100% would have gotten something classed, unambiguously, as spyware, in the distant past of ~15-20 years ago.
bayindirh 5y ago
> A quick check of Chrome installers returned identical hashes each time. OK, however, are we completely sure that Chrome installer doesn't generate this token on launch and talk with the mothership? This sounds like whitewashing Chrome just to increase the impact of the article or push Chrome or both. Like Chrome is not tracking me in and out of the internet and in the kitchen making tea and noting its brand and reporting to Google.
- zagrebian 5y ago
  > This sounds like whitewashing Chrome just to increase the impact of the article I removed ghacks from my RSS reader years ago because that website tends to sensationalize these stories, and I can’t stand that.
- brimble 5y ago
  Considering that ~everyone was tracking device or installation IDs before Apple cracked down on it, on iOS, I think it's a safe bet that ~everyone is still doing it on desktop, and yeah, generating at install time is probably enough for most use cases and makes your build and distribution processes simpler.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  The way firefox does it can connect the downloading session with the running session. You can argue with the value or validity of that, but it seems like the chrome installer cant do that, which is nice. As for why it's in the article I think it's valuable to include it since if chrome was doing it too it might be seen as just "normal", but now it seems even more weird that firefox which is supposed to be the privacy alternative is tracking something that google is not.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  >OK, however, are we completely sure that Chrome installer doesn't generate this token on launch and talk with the mothership? That wouldn't give any information about where/when you got the installer from, which is the topic of this article. Doing so would be impossible without embedding information in the exe (which would change the hash). While I agree that it's a little weird to specifically note it for Google of all companies, the relevance to the article is that Chrome isn't engaging in this specific type of tracking.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy. It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 5y ago
  This also wouldn't be so bad if people were capable of nuance instead of acting as if everything involving data were the same thing. I won't claim Mozilla is in any way perfect, but even as someone who is very much pro-privacy it is a little bit ridiculous how much people loose their shit about tiny things like this and claim there is no difference to what other trackers do.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    If you position your product as being about privacy, your company about being about privacy, and talk about the importance of online privacy whenever you get any sort of opportunity, then it looks extremely bad if you can't refrain from spying on your users. I don't really think there is any way around this fact. If this type of telemetry is necessary for Mozilla to develop software, then perhaps they shouldn't be talking so much about privacy, because as it stands, they're not walking the talk, that's what ultimately looks bad. The telemetry is incidental. Nobody is railing against Microsoft for doing the same thing because they're not constantly seen preaching about how bad it is.
    - detaro 5y ago
      do you seriously consider counting how many installs are triggered from a download "spying"? Privacy is a bit more complicated than that IMHO.
Wojakmeme 5y ago
Opt-out after tracking already happend? Sounds GDPR violating to me.
- Teandw 5y ago
  That's not how GDPR works. This isn't gathering personal data, PII or anything similar so wouldn't fall under the scope of GDPR.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    IP address can be PII. What are they hooking the download tracking code to if not IPs? If you sign up for a Mozilla account, providing PII, are you saying they then throw away the link between the install and original download?
    - Teandw 5y ago
      They don't need to hook an IP to a tracking code for this sort of testing? From what they've said it's very basic information they're looking to collect. "This installer was downloaded on X date. The installer was then used and run on X date." sort of thing. No IP is needed to check anything regarding that. Attaching an IP in the process somewhere for tracking would only be needed if you were checking things on a deeper level. For example, where a user might download the installer but is downloading and sending it to someone else, where it gets installed on a different IP/system.
brimble 5y ago
How... does that play nicely with signing and notarization on Windows and Mac? Asking for a friend :-)
fleddr 5y ago
"Mozilla notes that the opt-out mechanism is the standard Telemetry opt-out. How users may opt-out before the installation of Firefox is unclear." As dry as German humor gets :)
car_analogy 5y ago
Suppose you want to do something anonymously. 1. Download installer from Mozilla from your home network - Mozilla now has your home IP and installer ID. 2. Transfer it via USB key to a secure, anonymous computer - one not linked to you, on a network not associated with you, such as public WiFi. 3. Install Firefox using that installer on said computer. It transmits the installer ID to Mozilla, which matches the one given to your home IP, thereby deanonymizing you. 4. Mozilla receives a warrant for this information, or it is hacked, or the organization is infiltrated by a single government or corporate spy. Edit: It gets worse. Suppose a newspaper IT department takes care of providing Firefox and other trusted software installers to their reporters. Now Mozilla can determine who that newspaper helped with IT, such as journalists or sources. Or if you provide trusted software to your friends, Mozilla gets part of your social graph.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I can't remember exactly but Apple also does this with apps. "Downloaded from ...".
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Isn't that just storing the domain name from which served the file? I actually find this useful for those times when I can't remember where a file came from but need to use the site again. Having that data in a Get Info windo has been useful and faster than web searching.
  - weikju 5y ago
    Except this is an attribute saved on the file locally on your system, added by your browser when you download it, not something that Apple stores on their servers and tracks.
  - evilduck 5y ago
    That's a slight bit different because that file metadata is being assigned on the receiving client side and not from the distributor of the file. Likewise, that info is stored in your Spotlight index, not the file itself and isn't moved with the file (you can look at the raw metadata with the `mdls` command on a Mac and see that it is lost when you move something to a USB stick, or upload it to your own server or something)
idonotknowwhy 5y ago
So downloading from the arch Linux repo via pacman, I don't have a unique ID?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  No, but unless you go tweak a bunch of things you are still sending your information to Mozilla. Also, they've had a few "convenient" bugs that reverted privacy settings in the past.
moonshinefe 5y ago
"Principle 4: Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional."[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
- zagrebian 5y ago
  How was this principle violated in this case?
  - kreeben 5y ago
    It gives Mozilla the opportunity to connect my IP address with my browser with my Mozilla account. Mozilla needs to bow down to the US govt and supply them with this information should they have stored it, if the govt feels they need it.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      You log into your mozilla account from your browser through the goddamn internet. They literally have to have your IP address for that and that adds absolutely zero information than necessary. It is just “people want to be outraged over nothing” yet again.
      - 34679 5y ago
        I've used Firefox for years and have never created a Mozilla account.
        kaba0 5y ago
        Then they can’t link your nonexistent account together with your IP?
tag2103 5y ago
Oh look- yet another company that has been discovered to be dishonest in their approach to user privacy.
russdpale 5y ago
The state of web broswers is so pathetic I wish the government would step in and limit the amount of out right spying that is going on. We have created an entire society which thinks that so long as the data is simply 1 degree removed from anonymity, that everything is ok. Privacy is largely a mirage, where are our representatives to protect our privacy when the "free" market cannot, and indeed will not, do it for us?
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It's not on the radar of politics. We have some parties in Europe that care about it, but they are all under the flag of pirate parties which is self-defeating IMO. By associating themselves with piracy they always add a negative association to any debate about privacy. Which allows opponents to easily dismiss them with the "people only want privacy because they have something to hide" fallacy. If they want to be taken seriously they have to grow up and call themselves the privacy party. Of course there's also a lot all of us could do to make our interests know to mainstream politicians. Because don't forget, our adversaries are spending millions on lobbyists preaching the holy book of big data.
layer8 5y ago
> This will allow us to […] answer questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" That’s really not something they should spent much time puzzling over, much less implement tracking IDs for.
EastSmith 5y ago
Dead browser moves.
sciurus 5y ago
It's sounds like this is describing the stub attribution feature. You can read more details at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Stub_Attribution https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Stub_Attribution https://bedrock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stub-attribution.html https://bedrock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stub-attribution.ht...
- sciurus 5y ago
  I read over the article's links now and what I said service wasn't quite right. This looks like it's based on the stub attribution technique but expands it beyond what those links describe. You can see the server side of the implementation at the links below https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/9830 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/9830 https://github.com/mozilla-services/stubattribution/pull/103 https://github.com/mozilla-services/stubattribution/pull/103 You'll see references to bouncer as well, which is https://github.com/mozilla-services/go-bouncer https://github.com/mozilla-services/go-bouncer
noobermin 5y ago
Mozilla is fast becoming the bad guy even when they are pitched as the "alternative to google (as in chrome)." This is so disappointing.
mastazi 5y ago
Wait a second, can someone with more knowledge explain how Google Analytics is related to everything else? I don't understand the following sentence from the article: > This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs.
- Ayesh 5y ago
  IIRXC, Firefox has (had?) Google Analytics in new tab page and settings page. I don't think it's the same as standard web tracking script, but rather API calls with specific events. It is likely that they correlate the dltoken, Google Analytics tracking ID, and Telemetry IDs. The Google Analytics usage in Firefox is very difficult to Google, and I wholeheartedly wish my memory is wrong about this, because it's a very worrying thing otherwise.
aetherspawn 5y ago
No tracking codes will be used if the user has DNT set, which is most people who care about not being tracked.
- hiccuphippo 5y ago
  How do you set DNT before/during installation?
  - aetherspawn 5y ago
    Set DNT in internet explorer or chrome, I suppose.
- account42 5y ago
  > DNT set, which is most people who care about not being tracked. No, anyone who actually cares about not being tracked is not going to set a header that in practice is almost exclusively used to better track you.
humanwhosits 5y ago
Are we accidentally avoiding this when the firefox is provided pre-installed by ubuntu/fedora?
- schipplock 5y ago
  yes.
wooque 5y ago
Firefox doesn't have stellar privacy record anyway https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/
b215826 5y ago
Is this true about the x64 Linux tarball [1] that Mozilla distributes? It's difficult for Mozilla to create new tarballs for each download. [1]: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linu...
- kevincox 5y ago
  Why would it be difficult to create a different tarball for each download? You can just have a separately compressed section with the random ID that is replaced on-the-fly. Non trivial but a couple hours of work to implement and test probably.
- mmis1000 5y ago
  tarball don't really have a footer or header that contains info of all files. To add a file to a tarball, all you need is remove the end-of-file marker, append to it and make a new marker. And that works extremely well with stream compressors (you just remake the last section).
datavirtue 5y ago
I just disabled internet access for Firefox. Let's see if it phones home again.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Eek. At least I'm sure the Firefox that comes in FreeBSD's package system doesn't do this. As with most Linux users. Another reason a FOSS OS is essential.
throwaway48375 5y ago
I'm seriously considering switching from Firefox. I put a lot of effort into avoiding advertisements on all my devices and then Firefox goes and hijacks my system to show me an advertisement for some Disney+ movie and now this. I was able to disable the ads with an about:config modification and I always get my installers from ftp.mozilla.org so this didn't even personally effect me, but still I feel betrayed.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 5y ago
`git checkout v3.6` Mozilla needs to revert back to 3.6 (or older) and start the last 15 years of development over again.
jptech 5y ago
Does this apply to the offline installer too?
bofh23 5y ago
Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading many ghacks articles about browsers. However, I find it ironic that every link in the OP article reporting on user tracking practices is wrapped in opaque googleadservices links. By opaque, I mean the destination link is hidden.
vlark 5y ago
Yet one more reason to use Fennec on my tabs and phones.
notRobot 5y ago
On Windows, installing Firefox through Ninite should get around this. https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/
ex_mozilla 5y ago
I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I've been working at Mozilla since its inception. And eventually left the company 2 years ago. And I'm so mad. Mozilla is not the Mozilla that was created almost 20 years ago. It's not the same people there. After the Firefox 4 nightmare, they started hiring product managers from big corp. We started seeing some ex-twitter, ex-microsoft, ex-amazon joining the company. People with more professional ambitions. We didn't know how to react to Google Chrome and the smartphone revolution. We all trusted the upper management, but upper management was slowly becoming non-mozillians. And an absurd mechanic started: original engineer were busy writing difficult code. upper-management was morphing into some BS silicon valley gang. New young engineers were hired, and they thought the core of Mozilla values lied in these upper-management people. And slowly the original engineers started leaving, leaving behind this BS people with these young engineers. Marketing became "how to show we're good people". LGBT, women right, etc etc. Who gives a shit about Mozilla standing for these values? It's all marketing. The real only value, the manifesto, burnt a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, LGBT and such are important, but that's not the job of Mozilla. The last blow: getting rid of Brendan. Maybe he didn't have the same values employees had about LGBT, but fuck this. People in the silicon valley *love* being offended. And that thing was just too good of a fight for them. Brendan was the last bastion standing. I'm so so so mad. Mitchell trusted the wrong people. We were seeing all these ambitious silicon-valley-puppets taking the position of PM, director, etc etc… Got damn, all we wanted is to make Gecko amazing, light, in a lightweight simple browser. But all these stupid features that were landing on our head… I'm so mad… Rant over.
- fabrice_d 5y ago
  Don't you think Mitchell is a big part of the problem? She controls both MoCo and MoFo. She is a good motivational speaker but a terrible operational exec.
  - ex_mozilla 5y ago
    Hi Fabrice :) Yeah… of course. The whole thing was a mess…
- Dylan16807 5y ago
tablespoon 5y ago
Mozilla seems more interested in telemetry than actually making a browser.
spacexsucks 5y ago
As a long time netscape fan, xul browser dev. This is appalling. And frankly, I am ashamed of mozilla now.
cookiengineer 5y ago
I don't understand why this is news? Spyware watchdog posted about this years ago. It's been in there at least since 2016, and every time you open Firefox (not start!) it will happily broadcast its geo position information to their geolocation backend. The same goes for the WebRTC related STUN servers, which are always connected to when Firefox starts. I mean, come on folks. Never trust any software blindly. Use MITM proxy to verify. Use a host firewall like opensnitch. For the moment the best alternative is ungoogled chromium with ublock origin, even though the CSP headers cannot influence the DNS resolver mechanics in the CEF code. I am still busy forking webkit into retrokit and it's a shitload of work to remove these tracking features. [1] But a project like this needs more privacy like minded people. I mean, even the TOR people kind of gave up on this. Just look at their codebase, trying to stub everything anew with upstream changes. There's no point in trying to race against chrome in "whose browser has the most features", you can't win anyways. I don't care about WebGL or WebGPU, I don't care about WebRTC, I just want privacy back. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit
- aembleton 5y ago
  If you prefer Firefox to chrome, then the best alternative is librefox. Librefox is Firefox without all of the tracking: https://github.com/intika/Librefox/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox/
  - Rerarom 5y ago
    Why is this being downvoted?
    - ranguna 5y ago
      Because librefox is unmaintained. Use librewolf instead.
      - Rerarom 5y ago
        Thanks!
habibur 5y ago
Chrome had its per installation unique identifier too for some time. Visible right on the URL for every google search. Though I don't see it in recent years.
hans_castorp 5y ago
Does anyone know which hosts are contacted to send that information? Then those could easily be blocked in the network.
known 5y ago
perlgeek 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is illegal under GDPR (it violates the principle of using the least personal information possible).
pulse7 5y ago
This can be a GDPR violation... No user consent about this / no mention about this during download... hmmm...
02020202 5y ago
BuckRogers 5y ago
I moved from Firefox to Edge in August after 19 years of dedication. No regrets. They just kept killing features. I was one to ignore shenanigans like this download tracker. I tested every browser and my 2nd choice is Brave. But I found all browsers from non major vendors to be noticeably buggy in some way. I figure at this point in history, browsers are so complex (25M+LOC) and important that it no longer makes sense to not use native browsers. There’s many advantages to them. For me, daily usage of Edge and keeping Tor Browser installed has been great. I rarely use Tor, usually just when trying to get around IP bans or limitations, but I keep it installed out of principle. I wouldn’t rely on that small team to support a daily browser either.
vorticalbox 5y ago
The article doesn't mention installs via repositories, do these bypass the tracking?
tootahe45 5y ago
I'm honestly more comfortable with Google than companies that pretend to be into the whole privacy thing. At least Google doesn't try deceive you. I really hope nobody here uses TOR (developed by Mozilla?) for anything important, It seems like large parts of the network is owned by the govt.
Thorentis 5y ago
Firefox is dead. I stopped using it years ago when I realised there was no advantage in doing so. Use Brave instead.
coolandsmartrr 5y ago
Is there a good alternative to Firefox or Chrome? Chromium-based browsers really bog down my MacBook, so I've been using Firefox instead. However, I tend to notice small bugs, and been wondering if there are other useful and lightweight browsers.
- o_m 5y ago
  Safari. Other than those three there aren't any mature browser engines.
  - coolandsmartrr 5y ago
    Safari is very energy-efficient for sure. On the other hand, what I dislike about Safari is the hassle of installing extensions. Everything has to be installed through the App Store as an independent app.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
I thought this would be a somewhat clickbaity title, but not: > This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs. This will allow us to track which installs result from which downloads to determine the answers to questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" So it's basically to spy on people and track who's redistributing the installer or installing Firefox multiple times. As a software developer, I fail to see how this would help fix bugs or anything alike.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
> Mozilla notes that the opt-out mechanism is the standard Telemetry opt-out. How users may opt-out before the installation of Firefox is unclear. A quick check of Chrome installers returned identical hashes each time. This is why I keep insisting that we need a browser made in a jurisdiction which has at least minimal privacy rights. Having to explicitly opt-out of being tracked by a browser is not reasonable at all; browsers should only spy/track users who explicitly consent, not by default.
neycoda 5y ago
Firefox has been getting shadier over the years. What's going on with them?
li2uR3ce 5y ago
I really would like to see some proof of worth here. What changes--organizational wise, code wise, or otherwise--have been made as a result of this tracking? There seems to be a presumed usefulness for this tracking. Is there still a need to do this tracking? If it's genuinely useful and you're a transparent organization then it should be an easy thing to write up. "See! We avoided this *catastrophic* thing!" Demonstrate that the data has a very defining role in decision making or just get rid of it. The demonstration of its usefulness needs to continue as long as the tracking does. What significant problem(s) is being solved here? Sated curiosity isn't that compelling.
blex 5y ago
How does the .exe keep its valid digital signature if the hash of the .exe is modified for each person? Would someone have documentation about which bytes we can modify in a code-signed .exe without making the digital signature invalid? In the case it's not possible, does this mean Mozilla generates a new .exe on the fly + codesigns the .exe on the fly for each new download?
nonsequitarian 5y ago
I don't know how many folks will see this, and of those that do I don't expect many will necessarily be moved by what I say here. I'm going to say it anyways, however, and then I may never look at this thread again. I'm the person who designed the download token scheme that is discussed in this article, and, while I understand all of the concerns and suspicions, I believe that the way we designed this and the way we handle our telemetry data means that this is not the privacy violation some of you are claiming it is. Also, to be clear, I am speaking for myself here, these are my own thoughts and opinions, and I am not representing Mozilla in any official capacity. So, a download token is a UUID associated with a unique download event. It gets generated when you click the 'download' link, added to the installer, and then passed through to the installed browser. It is returned to us in the telemetry pings that the browser sends back to our telemetry ingestion endpoints. When the download happens, on the server side we capture the download token and the GA session ID and store those in a table. There is nothing else stored in this table. Having access to this table means that you can correlate the user's activity on the Mozilla website that GA provides with the telemetry data that Firefox sends us. The website activity contains URLs that the user visited, so we consider this "category 3" data (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection#Data_Collection_Categories https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection#Data_Collection_Cat...), quite sensitive. For that reason this table has highly restricted access, only a small number of individuals are able to get to it. Access restrictions offer no protection against subpoenas, of course. But I believe you can safely maintain your anonymity by opting out of our telemetry gathering, because when you opt out of telemetry we delete all of the historical telemetry data we have collected for your Firefox profile. Everything, including all of the records that contain the download token. If this happens, all we are left with is that original record with the download token and a GA session. The download token can no longer be correlated with your telemetry data, and we have no way of associating your Firefox installation with your GA session, not even under subpoena. And this is all assuming that you haven't blocked GA, or that you haven't specified 'Do Not Track' before visiting our website. If you've done either of those things, we won't have a GA session ID for you to begin with. Oh, incidentally, we never store any IP addresses or other PII in our telemetry data. That all gets scrubbed during ingestion. Again, I don't expect this to have much impact, but I'm sharing what I know to counter some of the more extreme claims that this removes the ability for Firefox users to remain anonymous. Finally, we have the obvious question: Why we would even do this? Believe it or not, understanding your user base does actually have some value in serving that user base. For most of Firefox's existence, there has been no trustable feedback loop. Sure, folks out there in the world have opinions, and share them, but opinions differ, and anecdotes are not data. If one person thinks most users will like a particular change, and someone else thinks they won't, nobody can prove their point in any meaningful way. The folks making decisions about Firefox have been flying blind. And, as many of you in this thread have pointed out, it hasn't necessarily been going that well. In Firefox's early years, there was lots of low hanging fruit, and the competition was a poorly maintained Internet Explorer, so it was easy to win a bunch of market share. Then Chrome came on the scene with their effectively limitless budget and famously data driven product process. We'll never match their budget, but we can try to make choices based on data instead of just letting whoever has the most organizational power decide. My team has spent the last few years building out a data infrastructure that we hope will support better decision making going forward while still trying to honor user privacy and choice. This is a tough balance to strike, and we're far from perfect, but we do our best. You can learn about or data collection infrastructure and policies in great detail on our docs site (https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html), and you can see nearly all of the code that handles our data ingestion and processing in our public repositories (https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion and https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl).
stereoradonc 5y ago
Remove this issue in 4 simple steps as follows: Open Firefox. Go to www.vivaldi.com Download, Install Vivaldi. In Windows: Add/Remove programs: Remove Firefox. Problem solved.

601 points by gslin 5y ago

Is the current Mozilla CEO a plant by Google with the goal of driving Mozilla into the ground as much as possible? I don't understand how they can keep fucking up their business so badly.

peakaboo 5y ago
A download identifier really isn't that bad. Maybe they need to actually show some numbers of their downloads to justify budgets and other things. It's not like they are having tracking JavaScript on 80% of the worlds Web sites like someone else I know, starting with Googl...
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  Download counts dont need you to embed a unique token. At the most basic level, you can get this by doing a count over http logs.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    To tell how many downloads result in an actual install http logs are not enough. You will get extra noise on top of the data you care about.
    - paranoidrobot 5y ago
      Download to install conversion also doesn't need an embedded token. It could be obtained through other data that doesn't need to track the individual install. I forget if Firefox has a 'welcome' page that it shows on first launch, but it could serve as the count of number of installs. I believe Firefox also has an auto update system, so that too could serve as an Active Users count. Lots of ways that you can derive this data without needing to track individual download to installation.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        Even if you do 'install' and 'first run' tracking without the unique identifier you need to have consent for EU citizens before sending the tracking request to Mozilla. As the IP is transmitted you would already be sending what the regulations call 'personal data'. The ID is just additional data that would probably be classified as PD (personal data) as well. So even basic install tracking is a no go. I also just don't understand why this would be necessary. This wasn't the case for software for how many decades? It didn't necessarily transmit such information. If it was commercial you probably had something like license server stuff in the later days (before just a number that was checked for validation). It probably became a thing when the mobile phone with app model rose. There the vendors (mostly Apple/Google) knew the downloads from the app stores and marketing wanted more. Especially when the pushed advertisements for apps. So companies like Adjust rose to fame for tracking ad clicks to installs, first run and usage stats. This probably led to others thinking it to be a great idea for general software as well.
soundnote 5y ago
"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JadeNB 5y ago
  I love this comment. It feels like it gets at the heart of a frustration that is otherwise difficult to articulate. I have passed it around to all those I know (with credit) in the hope that it helps them, too, at least name what they are facing as they struggle through bureaucratic morasses.
wubbert 5y ago
Mozilla does get a lot of their funding from Google...
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akselmo 5y ago

I would not download anything from Softonic. I know it's just an example but if you download anything from there you might get few surprises with the download.

Ayesh 5y ago
Agreed. Softonic for software is what Pinterest for images.
hddqsb 5y ago
Not just any example: Ghacks is owned by Softonic.
- akselmo 5y ago
  Well that explains!

hosteur 5y ago

How is this not a blatant violation of EU GDPR? This is involuntary non informed tracking.

woodruffw 5y ago
My understanding of the GDPR is that it doesn't apply if the analytics are fully anonymized, and only partially applies if the analytics are pseudonymous[1]. It's exceedingly likely that one of these cases applies, since the ID in question is tied to a single Mozilla installation, not individual user or even browser profile. [1]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-students-and-researchers/practical-data-protection-guidance-notices/anonymisation-and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-student...
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  At the same time IP addresses have been ruled to be personal information. They very clearly don't uniquely identify a person, but are close enough that it doesn't matter as the GDPR is concerned. Unique identifiers in general are murky waters.
- sdoering 5y ago
  It is PD (Personal Data). The same way an IP or any 'anonymous' identifier from web analytics is. So from my understanding of the GDPR regulations this is a clear violation.
sdoering 5y ago
I have just sent a complaint to the data protection officer responsible for me (of the German federal state in which I live). Let's see what happens (expectation: nothing).

0xdeadb00f 5y ago

I am sick, so sick at seeing all this bullshit that Mozilla is doing to my beloved browser. If this was a standalone issue, I probably wouldn't mind. But this one of a string of crap Mozilla has been doing.

IYasha 5y ago

400+ comments and nobody mentioned PaleMoon? Really?? I've been using it for a few years now, and for the most part it works well.

whatshisface 5y ago

Package manager installations wouldn't have this problem because everybody gets the same copy of the same binary and associated files, rights?

pxeger1 5y ago
Package manager installations are normally built from source by the distribution maintainers, not downloaded as binaries from the Mozilla website. So they wouldn't have any "download identifier", unique or not, in them.
Arnavion 5y ago
Yes. Just like with the Audacity kerfuffle some time ago, it's not a problem for distro packages, only when you get your binaries from upstream.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Which is what 95% of users would do though.. the average user will use Windows or Mac and has never heard of Chocolatey. Firefox is not in the Mac app store and I guess not on Windows either.
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    Windows actually knows about the Firefox installer tracker and blocks it: https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-blocks-firefox-installer-says-itll-hurt-your-pc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-blocks-firefox...
  - 0xBAADA555 5y ago
    It is on the Windows Store. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/mozilla-firefox-browser/9nzvdkpmr9rd https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/mozilla-firefox-browser/9n...
politelemon 5y ago
Correct and it's just one of many reasons why checksums and signatures are so important in package managers. There's an automatic enforcement of privacy and integrity.

dmead 5y ago

Why?

gjsman-1000 5y ago

I hate WebKit and Blink's domination as much as anyone, but rather than put up a strong fight, Firefox is begging to lose. And unfortunately, I can't help but admit that Firefox deserves to lose (not just from this, but from other terrible decisions added up), even if the consequences of a web monoculture are terrible.

noobermin 5y ago
How much of the drama of the last three years can be laid squarely at the feet of the CEO who gave themselves a raise right when they laid off the MDN staff?

kbelder 5y ago

Firefox users who prefer to download the browser without the unique identifier may do so in the following two ways: Download the Firefox installer from Mozilla's HTTPS repository (formerly the FTP repository). Download Firefox from third-party download sites that host the installer, e.g., from Softonic. It's nuts and another indication Mozilla doesn't understand the reason they exist, but it's not that hard to get around... if you're one of the 0.1% that hears about this.

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d110af5ccf 5y ago
Use a reputable Linux distro and install from the official repos, problem solved. To date the Debian maintainers have proven more trustworthy than 99.99% of the software vendors out there. They also appear to have better security practices than most commercial shops.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  That's a little difficult for 'official repo's that don't include ESR versions.
- 5ESS 5y ago
  It’s a shame debian flushed their reputation down the drain recently.
- lmm 5y ago
  Debian has a deliberate policy of extensively modifying upstream code, including security-critical code, without any dedicated security review. This (predictably) resulted in quite possibly the worst general-purpose software security bug of all time, where SSH and TLS keys generated on Debian machines were effectively blank and supposedly encrypted communications were readable by anyone. Debian has not changed its practices to prevent a reoccurrence and continues to follow the same policy. I agree that most Debian maintainers are trustworthy and have good intentions, but I would not consider them as having good security practices.

knodi 5y ago

wtf Mozilla, why are you making me stop using you?

seba_dos1 5y ago
As if there was any serious alternative that wasn't much worse.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  I mean if they both are going off the deep end for tracking chrome is faster and a ton of developers seem to only care if it works on chrome....
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    Well, Firefox' tracking is usually meant for determining things like where did the installer came from and collecting feature usage data, while Google's is all about building marketing profiles to sell targeted ads. You decide how bad each of them is.
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kaba0 5y ago
How is it making you stop using it? Like, people can’t see the difference between “telemetry” done by supermarkets by counting an approximate number of visitors vs the full-on knowing your childhood best-friends’ secret crush on you. There is eons of difference between the two.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It's the exact same thing. Doesn't matter why you're doing something wrong. The ends still don't justify the means.

freediver 5y ago

Zero telemetry is the only way to go for a modern browser with a sense of decency for the web and the users. I invite everyone on a Mac to try and support Orion browser - zero telemetry by default.

minitech 5y ago
Forgot to disclose your affiliation this time. This is embarrassing, by the way: > So forget user agent/screen resolution/OS masking and other marketing talk used by browsers - this was maybe a thing 15 years ago, if ever. This does not protect you against sophisticated fingerprinters on the web. > The only efficient protection against fingerprinting is what Orion is doing - preventing fingerprinter from running in the first place. Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with full first party and third party ad and tracking script blocker, built in by default, making sure invasive fingerprinters never run on the page.
- freediver 5y ago
  > Forgot to disclose your affiliation this time. I feel I did it many times so that it is clear. Also I used "I invite you..." phrase. > This is embarrassing, by the way: Care to explain why you think so?

gjsman-1000 5y ago

How much R&D do you think Firefox squandered on making a custom installer generator for every download and being unable to cache the files on a cheap CDN?

oh_sigh 5y ago
Not much? I did exactly this when I worked on a really popular P2P file sharing client (at one point estimated to be installed on >15% of all PCs worldwide). It even improved our actual installs, but that is probably about just using an ultralight weight installer rather than having a tracking ID integrated into it. It literally took me a week. Granted, things were really fast and loose back then. It would probably take me 2 years and a team of engineers to do a similar thing at my current FANG job.

ordu 5y ago

They seem to be trying to gather a lot of telemetry to measure how they can boost popularity of Firefox. I wonder did they tried to measure how the measurement itself influences popularity? Social measurements are like quantum ones, they change reality. There was a funny story of a Hawthorn Experiment[1], which tried to find ways to boost productivity but at the end managed to state just that the very attempt to conduct an experiment boosts productivity. It seems to me that with Mozilla the effect has a opposite sign and any attempt to measure decreases the target variables of decision making. And therefore they need to find ways to measure "non-invasively", not to measure every little thing they can measure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

causality0 5y ago
Well they've spent a decade trying the "be more like Chrome" method. I suggest they try the "be more like Firefox from when Firefox was successful" method.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  Firefox was successful when it was the alternative, better, option to the dominant Internet Explorer. Now the dominant browser is Chrom(e|ium). The two scenarios are very different.
  - causality0 5y ago
    Precisely. Firefox is never going to defeat Chrome in the "being Chrome" category. If it wants to exist as more than a tool for Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits, it can't keep playing that game. It has to differentiate. Privacy is not differentiation because it's invisible and HN commentators are 90% of the people who care about it. I want the sense of power back. I want the feeling that Firefox gave me a decade ago that my browser behaved exactly the way I wanted it to and nothing about it ticked me off because if I didn't like it I could just change it. Nowadays using Firefox feels more like holding a political demonstration in an empty room than using the finely-tuned instrument I once had.

rkagerer 5y ago

How long has it been that way?

cf141q5325 5y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497 Its from a year ago

lostgame 5y ago

Okay, first the stupid fucking ‘Turning Red’ advertisement that dared to call itself ‘adorable’, and now this? Seriously, does FireFox hate itself, or just hates it’s dwindling but loyal user base? We used to use Firefox because they didn’t do shit like this. I actually deleted Firefox after about 15 years of loyal use after the ‘Turning Red’ incident. Glad to hear I made the right call. I’ve been using Safari and have no regrets. Goodbye, Firefox. Good riddance, if this is how you’ll behave. It’s sad to watch the dream of a mainstream open-source browser that wasn’t evil vanish. We will need something else, but I don’t see huge potential adoption for anything. It was hard enough to get people to swap browsers in the 00’s, it’s gonna be way harder with each platform pushing its own pre-installed browser.

klntsky 5y ago

> This will allow us to track which installs result from which downloads to determine the answers to questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" What value does Mozilla see in being able to do that?

cxr 5y ago
The prevailing belief in the industry is that any problem can be solved with more data, dumpster-grade[1] though it may be. It's appealing to think that it can be used in lieu of just making thoughtful decisions. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
I have no idea what the actual answer is, but one can image that they want to understand where are people getting these copies of ff if they do not download them themselves. Why would this be important, again just speculating: to try to leverage whatever channel this might uncover to distribute even more copies of the browser. Is this ID thing the best way to do it, though? Probably.
- noAnswer 5y ago
  > but one can image that they want to understand where are people getting these copies of ff if they do not download them themselves. These people are getting it obviously from their admins! (Like myself. I push Firefox updates to close to 1000 PCs. I thought (amongst other things) I'm doing them a favour by saving them traffic.) They obviously know that! The real reason they are doing this is simply because they started collecting data. Now they are hooked and constantly want more. That is all there is to it. They already identify each individual installation, so someone on the team said: Let's identify each download too.
  - detaro 5y ago
    > These people are getting it obviously from their admins! That's one possibility. And even if you pretend it's the only one, it's still interesting how that's distributed. Is it X admins of 1000-PC orgs, or X*500 people who also install it on dads PC? Count how often each token is used, and you got a histogram, and if you just record that you've not collected anything remotely sensitive about any user. This question can be answered extremely cleanly.

xnx 5y ago

This is late-stage Firefox behavior. Like Yahoo in 2012.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Remember what happened when Firefox OS died? It was forked into KaiOS, which has become a superior product that actually found a market. I will not mourn the death of Mozilla. When it collapses, may it be forked and turn into something decent by more competent leaders who don't give themselves multimillion dollar salaries and make pointless acquisitions.

soundnote 5y ago
But KaiOS is not a high status Cali techie project.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cf141q5325 5y ago

From the linked bugzilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 >One note, in case it's not already clear: The download token will be available in the telemetry environment, but all web session data that it is linked to will NOT ever be included in telemetry, it is being deliberately kept in a separate data set, and we will be limiting access to the ability to join these data sets to a small set of people. Small set of people? Pls do tell me more

perryizgr8 5y ago
This is very alarming. If web session data will never be included in telemetry, why do some people have to ability to query joins? That means it can happen. Why does this small set of people need to access my web session data? I don't use Firefox regularly, but I have it installed on my computers. I think I'm going to uninstall it completely. This stuff has become more and more common, and is totally unacceptable.
xtanx 5y ago
> Approval granted by Privacy. Good to go. Great job there "Privacy"...
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  This is an example of where openness — which Mozilla used to excel at — would have helped. If there was a detailed rationale considering the potential privacy impact of this change, publicly available, then we'd be able to see that Mozilla did indeed thoughtfully weigh up the consequences of doing this. We may disagree with the decision, but at least we'd be able to see the set of underlying assumptions and point to which one we think is wrong, and perhaps provide evidence to show it's mistaken — constructive feedback. But as it is, we just have an opaque assertion that “this is fine”.
josefx 5y ago
> Small set of people? The entirety of the US government most likely, any hacker that manages to get onto Mozillas servers, every spy agency worth its money, if its choice of research partners has something to say everyone at Meta. So in total maybe a bit bellow a million people. So really just a handful of trusted people.

blibble 5y ago

how does this get through the MS smartscreen and authenticode checks?

laurent123456 5y ago
As long as the executable is signed (and it must be), and the company well known, Windows should be fine with it.
dataflow 5y ago
In fact this is how you get past SmartScreen checks. Windows freaks out a lot more when it sees the same file being downloaded by lots of people, but if you make them all different, then it calms down.
eps 5y ago
There is a way to add random data to signed executables without invalidating the sig. Data, not code. Smartscreen is bypassed by using EV sig, which gives the exe an instant reputation boost.
- blex 5y ago
  Would you have documentation about this? Where can random bytes be added to a signed exe without invalidating the sig?
blex 5y ago
Yes, how does the .exe keep its valid digital signature if the hash of the .exe is modified for each person? Would someone have documentation about which bytes we can modify in a code-signed .exe without making the digital signature invalid? In the case it's not possible, does this mean Mozilla generates a new .exe on the fly + codesigns the .exe on the fly for each new download?

bradyd 5y ago

From the dltoken_data_review.md [1]: >> 9) If this data collection is default on, what is the opt-out mechanism for users? >> Standard Telemetry Opt-Out If you haven't installed it yet, how can you use the standard telemetry opt-out? [1] https://bug1677497.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9195911 https://bug1677497.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9195...

mindslight 5y ago

IMO as market optimization turns the screws ever harder, the escape hatch is to head towards source distributions. Outrage articles are only necessary because people have come to rely on these monolithic binary downloads with their "channels" and "installers" and "auto updaters", that are gatekept by centralized entities like Mozilla. Whereas if say the source tarball used by Nix is engaging in similar shenanigans, that is fixable with a self-applied patch rather than needing to convince Mozilla to change.

gandalfff 5y ago

I don't really understand telemetry. How is Google Analytics helping them to improve the browser? Is it to see which features are actually being used?

emerged 5y ago
They ignore their users in all other aspects so it seems unlikely to be driven by that.
brimble 5y ago
Imagine you could stick a camera over your users' shoulders, mostly without them knowing you're doing it, instead of doing actual user research. That's what the stuff's for. Some of the tools for these things record entire sessions, including mouse movements. It's creepy as hell and even the tamest of "telemetry" 100% would have gotten something classed, unambiguously, as spyware, in the distant past of ~15-20 years ago.

bayindirh 5y ago

> A quick check of Chrome installers returned identical hashes each time. OK, however, are we completely sure that Chrome installer doesn't generate this token on launch and talk with the mothership? This sounds like whitewashing Chrome just to increase the impact of the article or push Chrome or both. Like Chrome is not tracking me in and out of the internet and in the kitchen making tea and noting its brand and reporting to Google.

zagrebian 5y ago
> This sounds like whitewashing Chrome just to increase the impact of the article I removed ghacks from my RSS reader years ago because that website tends to sensationalize these stories, and I can’t stand that.
brimble 5y ago
Considering that ~everyone was tracking device or installation IDs before Apple cracked down on it, on iOS, I think it's a safe bet that ~everyone is still doing it on desktop, and yeah, generating at install time is probably enough for most use cases and makes your build and distribution processes simpler.
SahAssar 5y ago
The way firefox does it can connect the downloading session with the running session. You can argue with the value or validity of that, but it seems like the chrome installer cant do that, which is nice. As for why it's in the article I think it's valuable to include it since if chrome was doing it too it might be seen as just "normal", but now it seems even more weird that firefox which is supposed to be the privacy alternative is tracking something that google is not.
LordDragonfang 5y ago
>OK, however, are we completely sure that Chrome installer doesn't generate this token on launch and talk with the mothership? That wouldn't give any information about where/when you got the installer from, which is the topic of this article. Doing so would be impossible without embedding information in the exe (which would change the hash). While I agree that it's a little weird to specifically note it for Google of all companies, the relevance to the article is that Chrome isn't engaging in this specific type of tracking.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy. It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
detaro 5y ago
This also wouldn't be so bad if people were capable of nuance instead of acting as if everything involving data were the same thing. I won't claim Mozilla is in any way perfect, but even as someone who is very much pro-privacy it is a little bit ridiculous how much people loose their shit about tiny things like this and claim there is no difference to what other trackers do.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  If you position your product as being about privacy, your company about being about privacy, and talk about the importance of online privacy whenever you get any sort of opportunity, then it looks extremely bad if you can't refrain from spying on your users. I don't really think there is any way around this fact. If this type of telemetry is necessary for Mozilla to develop software, then perhaps they shouldn't be talking so much about privacy, because as it stands, they're not walking the talk, that's what ultimately looks bad. The telemetry is incidental. Nobody is railing against Microsoft for doing the same thing because they're not constantly seen preaching about how bad it is.
  - detaro 5y ago
    do you seriously consider counting how many installs are triggered from a download "spying"? Privacy is a bit more complicated than that IMHO.

Wojakmeme 5y ago

Opt-out after tracking already happend? Sounds GDPR violating to me.

Teandw 5y ago
That's not how GDPR works. This isn't gathering personal data, PII or anything similar so wouldn't fall under the scope of GDPR.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  IP address can be PII. What are they hooking the download tracking code to if not IPs? If you sign up for a Mozilla account, providing PII, are you saying they then throw away the link between the install and original download?
  - Teandw 5y ago
    They don't need to hook an IP to a tracking code for this sort of testing? From what they've said it's very basic information they're looking to collect. "This installer was downloaded on X date. The installer was then used and run on X date." sort of thing. No IP is needed to check anything regarding that. Attaching an IP in the process somewhere for tracking would only be needed if you were checking things on a deeper level. For example, where a user might download the installer but is downloading and sending it to someone else, where it gets installed on a different IP/system.

brimble 5y ago

How... does that play nicely with signing and notarization on Windows and Mac? Asking for a friend :-)

fleddr 5y ago

"Mozilla notes that the opt-out mechanism is the standard Telemetry opt-out. How users may opt-out before the installation of Firefox is unclear." As dry as German humor gets :)

car_analogy 5y ago

Suppose you want to do something anonymously. 1. Download installer from Mozilla from your home network - Mozilla now has your home IP and installer ID. 2. Transfer it via USB key to a secure, anonymous computer - one not linked to you, on a network not associated with you, such as public WiFi. 3. Install Firefox using that installer on said computer. It transmits the installer ID to Mozilla, which matches the one given to your home IP, thereby deanonymizing you. 4. Mozilla receives a warrant for this information, or it is hacked, or the organization is infiltrated by a single government or corporate spy. Edit: It gets worse. Suppose a newspaper IT department takes care of providing Firefox and other trusted software installers to their reporters. Now Mozilla can determine who that newspaper helped with IT, such as journalists or sources. Or if you provide trusted software to your friends, Mozilla gets part of your social graph.

systemvoltage 5y ago
I can't remember exactly but Apple also does this with apps. "Downloaded from ...".
- dylan604 5y ago
  Isn't that just storing the domain name from which served the file? I actually find this useful for those times when I can't remember where a file came from but need to use the site again. Having that data in a Get Info windo has been useful and faster than web searching.
- weikju 5y ago
  Except this is an attribute saved on the file locally on your system, added by your browser when you download it, not something that Apple stores on their servers and tracks.
- evilduck 5y ago
  That's a slight bit different because that file metadata is being assigned on the receiving client side and not from the distributor of the file. Likewise, that info is stored in your Spotlight index, not the file itself and isn't moved with the file (you can look at the raw metadata with the `mdls` command on a Mac and see that it is lost when you move something to a USB stick, or upload it to your own server or something)

idonotknowwhy 5y ago

So downloading from the arch Linux repo via pacman, I don't have a unique ID?

encryptluks2 5y ago
No, but unless you go tweak a bunch of things you are still sending your information to Mozilla. Also, they've had a few "convenient" bugs that reverted privacy settings in the past.

moonshinefe 5y ago

"Principle 4: Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional."[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

encryptluks2 5y ago
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
zagrebian 5y ago
How was this principle violated in this case?
- kreeben 5y ago
  It gives Mozilla the opportunity to connect my IP address with my browser with my Mozilla account. Mozilla needs to bow down to the US govt and supply them with this information should they have stored it, if the govt feels they need it.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    You log into your mozilla account from your browser through the goddamn internet. They literally have to have your IP address for that and that adds absolutely zero information than necessary. It is just “people want to be outraged over nothing” yet again.
    - 34679 5y ago
      I've used Firefox for years and have never created a Mozilla account.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        Then they can’t link your nonexistent account together with your IP?

tag2103 5y ago

Oh look- yet another company that has been discovered to be dishonest in their approach to user privacy.

russdpale 5y ago

The state of web broswers is so pathetic I wish the government would step in and limit the amount of out right spying that is going on. We have created an entire society which thinks that so long as the data is simply 1 degree removed from anonymity, that everything is ok. Privacy is largely a mirage, where are our representatives to protect our privacy when the "free" market cannot, and indeed will not, do it for us?

GekkePrutser 5y ago
It's not on the radar of politics. We have some parties in Europe that care about it, but they are all under the flag of pirate parties which is self-defeating IMO. By associating themselves with piracy they always add a negative association to any debate about privacy. Which allows opponents to easily dismiss them with the "people only want privacy because they have something to hide" fallacy. If they want to be taken seriously they have to grow up and call themselves the privacy party. Of course there's also a lot all of us could do to make our interests know to mainstream politicians. Because don't forget, our adversaries are spending millions on lobbyists preaching the holy book of big data.

layer8 5y ago

> This will allow us to […] answer questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" That’s really not something they should spent much time puzzling over, much less implement tracking IDs for.

EastSmith 5y ago

Dead browser moves.

sciurus 5y ago

It's sounds like this is describing the stub attribution feature. You can read more details at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Stub_Attribution https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Stub_Attribution https://bedrock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stub-attribution.html https://bedrock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stub-attribution.ht...

sciurus 5y ago
I read over the article's links now and what I said service wasn't quite right. This looks like it's based on the stub attribution technique but expands it beyond what those links describe. You can see the server side of the implementation at the links below https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/9830 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/9830 https://github.com/mozilla-services/stubattribution/pull/103 https://github.com/mozilla-services/stubattribution/pull/103 You'll see references to bouncer as well, which is https://github.com/mozilla-services/go-bouncer https://github.com/mozilla-services/go-bouncer

noobermin 5y ago

Mozilla is fast becoming the bad guy even when they are pitched as the "alternative to google (as in chrome)." This is so disappointing.

mastazi 5y ago

Wait a second, can someone with more knowledge explain how Google Analytics is related to everything else? I don't understand the following sentence from the article: > This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs.

Ayesh 5y ago
IIRXC, Firefox has (had?) Google Analytics in new tab page and settings page. I don't think it's the same as standard web tracking script, but rather API calls with specific events. It is likely that they correlate the dltoken, Google Analytics tracking ID, and Telemetry IDs. The Google Analytics usage in Firefox is very difficult to Google, and I wholeheartedly wish my memory is wrong about this, because it's a very worrying thing otherwise.

aetherspawn 5y ago

No tracking codes will be used if the user has DNT set, which is most people who care about not being tracked.

hiccuphippo 5y ago
How do you set DNT before/during installation?
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  Set DNT in internet explorer or chrome, I suppose.
account42 5y ago
> DNT set, which is most people who care about not being tracked. No, anyone who actually cares about not being tracked is not going to set a header that in practice is almost exclusively used to better track you.

humanwhosits 5y ago

Are we accidentally avoiding this when the firefox is provided pre-installed by ubuntu/fedora?

schipplock 5y ago
yes.

wooque 5y ago

Firefox doesn't have stellar privacy record anyway https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/

b215826 5y ago

Is this true about the x64 Linux tarball [1] that Mozilla distributes? It's difficult for Mozilla to create new tarballs for each download. [1]: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linu...

kevincox 5y ago
Why would it be difficult to create a different tarball for each download? You can just have a separately compressed section with the random ID that is replaced on-the-fly. Non trivial but a couple hours of work to implement and test probably.
mmis1000 5y ago
tarball don't really have a footer or header that contains info of all files. To add a file to a tarball, all you need is remove the end-of-file marker, append to it and make a new marker. And that works extremely well with stream compressors (you just remake the last section).

datavirtue 5y ago

I just disabled internet access for Firefox. Let's see if it phones home again.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Eek. At least I'm sure the Firefox that comes in FreeBSD's package system doesn't do this. As with most Linux users. Another reason a FOSS OS is essential.

throwaway48375 5y ago

I'm seriously considering switching from Firefox. I put a lot of effort into avoiding advertisements on all my devices and then Firefox goes and hijacks my system to show me an advertisement for some Disney+ movie and now this. I was able to disable the ads with an about:config modification and I always get my installers from ftp.mozilla.org so this didn't even personally effect me, but still I feel betrayed.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 5y ago

`git checkout v3.6` Mozilla needs to revert back to 3.6 (or older) and start the last 15 years of development over again.

jptech 5y ago

Does this apply to the offline installer too?

bofh23 5y ago

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading many ghacks articles about browsers. However, I find it ironic that every link in the OP article reporting on user tracking practices is wrapped in opaque googleadservices links. By opaque, I mean the destination link is hidden.

vlark 5y ago

Yet one more reason to use Fennec on my tabs and phones.

notRobot 5y ago

On Windows, installing Firefox through Ninite should get around this. https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/

ex_mozilla 5y ago

I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I've been working at Mozilla since its inception. And eventually left the company 2 years ago. And I'm so mad. Mozilla is not the Mozilla that was created almost 20 years ago. It's not the same people there. After the Firefox 4 nightmare, they started hiring product managers from big corp. We started seeing some ex-twitter, ex-microsoft, ex-amazon joining the company. People with more professional ambitions. We didn't know how to react to Google Chrome and the smartphone revolution. We all trusted the upper management, but upper management was slowly becoming non-mozillians. And an absurd mechanic started: original engineer were busy writing difficult code. upper-management was morphing into some BS silicon valley gang. New young engineers were hired, and they thought the core of Mozilla values lied in these upper-management people. And slowly the original engineers started leaving, leaving behind this BS people with these young engineers. Marketing became "how to show we're good people". LGBT, women right, etc etc. Who gives a shit about Mozilla standing for these values? It's all marketing. The real only value, the manifesto, burnt a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, LGBT and such are important, but that's not the job of Mozilla. The last blow: getting rid of Brendan. Maybe he didn't have the same values employees had about LGBT, but fuck this. People in the silicon valley *love* being offended. And that thing was just too good of a fight for them. Brendan was the last bastion standing. I'm so so so mad. Mitchell trusted the wrong people. We were seeing all these ambitious silicon-valley-puppets taking the position of PM, director, etc etc… Got damn, all we wanted is to make Gecko amazing, light, in a lightweight simple browser. But all these stupid features that were landing on our head… I'm so mad… Rant over.

fabrice_d 5y ago
Don't you think Mitchell is a big part of the problem? She controls both MoCo and MoFo. She is a good motivational speaker but a terrible operational exec.
- ex_mozilla 5y ago
  Hi Fabrice :) Yeah… of course. The whole thing was a mess…
Dylan16807 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

Mozilla seems more interested in telemetry than actually making a browser.

spacexsucks 5y ago

As a long time netscape fan, xul browser dev. This is appalling. And frankly, I am ashamed of mozilla now.

cookiengineer 5y ago

I don't understand why this is news? Spyware watchdog posted about this years ago. It's been in there at least since 2016, and every time you open Firefox (not start!) it will happily broadcast its geo position information to their geolocation backend. The same goes for the WebRTC related STUN servers, which are always connected to when Firefox starts. I mean, come on folks. Never trust any software blindly. Use MITM proxy to verify. Use a host firewall like opensnitch. For the moment the best alternative is ungoogled chromium with ublock origin, even though the CSP headers cannot influence the DNS resolver mechanics in the CEF code. I am still busy forking webkit into retrokit and it's a shitload of work to remove these tracking features. [1] But a project like this needs more privacy like minded people. I mean, even the TOR people kind of gave up on this. Just look at their codebase, trying to stub everything anew with upstream changes. There's no point in trying to race against chrome in "whose browser has the most features", you can't win anyways. I don't care about WebGL or WebGPU, I don't care about WebRTC, I just want privacy back. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

aembleton 5y ago
If you prefer Firefox to chrome, then the best alternative is librefox. Librefox is Firefox without all of the tracking: https://github.com/intika/Librefox/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox/
- Rerarom 5y ago
  Why is this being downvoted?
  - ranguna 5y ago
    Because librefox is unmaintained. Use librewolf instead.
    - Rerarom 5y ago
      Thanks!

habibur 5y ago

Chrome had its per installation unique identifier too for some time. Visible right on the URL for every google search. Though I don't see it in recent years.

hans_castorp 5y ago

Does anyone know which hosts are contacted to send that information? Then those could easily be blocked in the network.

known 5y ago

perlgeek 5y ago

I'm pretty sure this is illegal under GDPR (it violates the principle of using the least personal information possible).

pulse7 5y ago

This can be a GDPR violation... No user consent about this / no mention about this during download... hmmm...

02020202 5y ago

BuckRogers 5y ago

I moved from Firefox to Edge in August after 19 years of dedication. No regrets. They just kept killing features. I was one to ignore shenanigans like this download tracker. I tested every browser and my 2nd choice is Brave. But I found all browsers from non major vendors to be noticeably buggy in some way. I figure at this point in history, browsers are so complex (25M+LOC) and important that it no longer makes sense to not use native browsers. There’s many advantages to them. For me, daily usage of Edge and keeping Tor Browser installed has been great. I rarely use Tor, usually just when trying to get around IP bans or limitations, but I keep it installed out of principle. I wouldn’t rely on that small team to support a daily browser either.

vorticalbox 5y ago

The article doesn't mention installs via repositories, do these bypass the tracking?

tootahe45 5y ago

I'm honestly more comfortable with Google than companies that pretend to be into the whole privacy thing. At least Google doesn't try deceive you. I really hope nobody here uses TOR (developed by Mozilla?) for anything important, It seems like large parts of the network is owned by the govt.

Thorentis 5y ago

Firefox is dead. I stopped using it years ago when I realised there was no advantage in doing so. Use Brave instead.

coolandsmartrr 5y ago

Is there a good alternative to Firefox or Chrome? Chromium-based browsers really bog down my MacBook, so I've been using Firefox instead. However, I tend to notice small bugs, and been wondering if there are other useful and lightweight browsers.

o_m 5y ago
Safari. Other than those three there aren't any mature browser engines.
- coolandsmartrr 5y ago
  Safari is very energy-efficient for sure. On the other hand, what I dislike about Safari is the hassle of installing extensions. Everything has to be installed through the App Store as an independent app.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

I thought this would be a somewhat clickbaity title, but not: > This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs. This will allow us to track which installs result from which downloads to determine the answers to questions like, "Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?" So it's basically to spy on people and track who's redistributing the installer or installing Firefox multiple times. As a software developer, I fail to see how this would help fix bugs or anything alike.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

> Mozilla notes that the opt-out mechanism is the standard Telemetry opt-out. How users may opt-out before the installation of Firefox is unclear. A quick check of Chrome installers returned identical hashes each time. This is why I keep insisting that we need a browser made in a jurisdiction which has at least minimal privacy rights. Having to explicitly opt-out of being tracked by a browser is not reasonable at all; browsers should only spy/track users who explicitly consent, not by default.

neycoda 5y ago

Firefox has been getting shadier over the years. What's going on with them?

li2uR3ce 5y ago

I really would like to see some proof of worth here. What changes--organizational wise, code wise, or otherwise--have been made as a result of this tracking? There seems to be a presumed usefulness for this tracking. Is there still a need to do this tracking? If it's genuinely useful and you're a transparent organization then it should be an easy thing to write up. "See! We avoided this *catastrophic* thing!" Demonstrate that the data has a very defining role in decision making or just get rid of it. The demonstration of its usefulness needs to continue as long as the tracking does. What significant problem(s) is being solved here? Sated curiosity isn't that compelling.

blex 5y ago

How does the .exe keep its valid digital signature if the hash of the .exe is modified for each person? Would someone have documentation about which bytes we can modify in a code-signed .exe without making the digital signature invalid? In the case it's not possible, does this mean Mozilla generates a new .exe on the fly + codesigns the .exe on the fly for each new download?

nonsequitarian 5y ago

I don't know how many folks will see this, and of those that do I don't expect many will necessarily be moved by what I say here. I'm going to say it anyways, however, and then I may never look at this thread again. I'm the person who designed the download token scheme that is discussed in this article, and, while I understand all of the concerns and suspicions, I believe that the way we designed this and the way we handle our telemetry data means that this is not the privacy violation some of you are claiming it is. Also, to be clear, I am speaking for myself here, these are my own thoughts and opinions, and I am not representing Mozilla in any official capacity. So, a download token is a UUID associated with a unique download event. It gets generated when you click the 'download' link, added to the installer, and then passed through to the installed browser. It is returned to us in the telemetry pings that the browser sends back to our telemetry ingestion endpoints. When the download happens, on the server side we capture the download token and the GA session ID and store those in a table. There is nothing else stored in this table. Having access to this table means that you can correlate the user's activity on the Mozilla website that GA provides with the telemetry data that Firefox sends us. The website activity contains URLs that the user visited, so we consider this "category 3" data (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection#Data_Collection_Categories https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection#Data_Collection_Cat...), quite sensitive. For that reason this table has highly restricted access, only a small number of individuals are able to get to it. Access restrictions offer no protection against subpoenas, of course. But I believe you can safely maintain your anonymity by opting out of our telemetry gathering, because when you opt out of telemetry we delete all of the historical telemetry data we have collected for your Firefox profile. Everything, including all of the records that contain the download token. If this happens, all we are left with is that original record with the download token and a GA session. The download token can no longer be correlated with your telemetry data, and we have no way of associating your Firefox installation with your GA session, not even under subpoena. And this is all assuming that you haven't blocked GA, or that you haven't specified 'Do Not Track' before visiting our website. If you've done either of those things, we won't have a GA session ID for you to begin with. Oh, incidentally, we never store any IP addresses or other PII in our telemetry data. That all gets scrubbed during ingestion. Again, I don't expect this to have much impact, but I'm sharing what I know to counter some of the more extreme claims that this removes the ability for Firefox users to remain anonymous. Finally, we have the obvious question: Why we would even do this? Believe it or not, understanding your user base does actually have some value in serving that user base. For most of Firefox's existence, there has been no trustable feedback loop. Sure, folks out there in the world have opinions, and share them, but opinions differ, and anecdotes are not data. If one person thinks most users will like a particular change, and someone else thinks they won't, nobody can prove their point in any meaningful way. The folks making decisions about Firefox have been flying blind. And, as many of you in this thread have pointed out, it hasn't necessarily been going that well. In Firefox's early years, there was lots of low hanging fruit, and the competition was a poorly maintained Internet Explorer, so it was easy to win a bunch of market share. Then Chrome came on the scene with their effectively limitless budget and famously data driven product process. We'll never match their budget, but we can try to make choices based on data instead of just letting whoever has the most organizational power decide. My team has spent the last few years building out a data infrastructure that we hope will support better decision making going forward while still trying to honor user privacy and choice. This is a tough balance to strike, and we're far from perfect, but we do our best. You can learn about or data collection infrastructure and policies in great detail on our docs site (https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html), and you can see nearly all of the code that handles our data ingestion and processing in our public repositories (https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion and https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl).

stereoradonc 5y ago

Remove this issue in 4 simple steps as follows: Open Firefox. Go to www.vivaldi.com Download, Install Vivaldi. In Windows: Add/Remove programs: Remove Firefox. Problem solved.