See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy
See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy
blog.mozilla.org
See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy | The Mozilla Blog
To disable it in about:config
browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled = false
browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled = false
People really need to kill that notion that telemetry is automatically bad. If the information they are collecting is minimal, as non-identifiable as possible and actually being used to help develop the browser, it's a good thing.
Yes, turbo nerds in the back, specially being opt-out, opt-in telemetry is pretty much useless for trying to understand the majority of your user base.
There is an actually moral alternative to opt-out that doesn't have the poor-sampling problem of opt-in: ask for consent explicitly.
It's the ideal solution morally-wise, but it still samples out a ton of users precisely because people are used to the idea of telemetry = bad
Syncthing is one of the best examples of telemetry done well. On first startup, they ask if you agree to enable telemetry, they show the data that will be send and inform users that the collected data can be viewed at https://data.syncthing.net/
I agree with you. There are projects where I opt in and enable telemetry, such as KDE or opt in the Steam survey whenever asked. Steam in particularly does a good job on representing the data in front of me that is sent back.
Problem is, its a bit ghosty what is actually being collected and sent for most people. Is it really non-identifiable as we think now? You know, sometimes later things get revealed and suddenly the entire time you was living in a lie (Privacy mode thing, where people had a misconception). If its enabled by default, this is especially bad, because this should be opt in. Telemetry is not bad per se, but it is bad if its enabled without user agreement.
Wrong. In example Steam does an opt in and the data is somewhat representative. You don't need to watch every user to know what is going on. A small sample is enough to understand the majority of the user base by extrapolating the data. Telemetry does not need to be exactly perfect to be useful, it just needs to help understanding trends or huge bottlenecks.
Yeah I normally opt out of all tracking or telemetry, but when it’s a project that I feel like I can trust and want to make better I make sure to turn it on.
That must be why Mozilla and Microsoft famously serve the needs of their users so well.
Read what I said again. It is not automatically bad, and it doesn't mean it can't be poorly used or poorly understood by the ones collecting it. It just means that it is an effective way to understand how your users are using your product.
Putting Mozilla (which from what I can tell is doing as much as they can trying to collect this telemetry data in a way that can't be used to identify its users) in the same domain as Microsoft, which collects pretty much everything it can to sell to third party advertisers is ridiculous as best and disingenuous at worst.
In case of Microsoft, this is a whole new dimension and not comparable to Mozilla. First Microsoft products are (usually) closed source. That alone is a black box and we don't know what is sent, compared to open source Mozilla projects we can actually understand what is going on and report. Secondly, Microsoft does it not only with the browser, but on the entire operating system, if you want it or not. It's not opt in, not opt out, its just selecting a few options to sent a few less data, that's all. Which BTW reset themselves sometimes for unknown reasons.
Putting Mozilla and Microsoft in the same sentence about privacy and telemetry is heresy (towards Mozilla)!
So which organisation with many userse serves the needs of their users better without collecting data?