4mo ago

Mozilla Has Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default

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Mozilla Has Likely Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default

TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This data was then shared with advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.

3 comments

Ever since this setting has existed, Mozilla contributors and employees have told people to enable it, in order to ensure that Mozilla developers have insight into how people use Firefox, to help make Firefox better. While this post will prove my (naive) impression wrong, I had never seen anyone mention that this setting shared data with advertisers.
And yet, that is what Mozilla is telling us.
I mean, if your first action with any new connected device or software isn't turning off all the data reporting, i dunno what to tell you. Do it, I guess.
- I actually wanted to help make Firefox a better product. 🤷
  
  Understood. I always felt that if it crashed in bizarre ways I'd send the crash report or something - open a ticket, whatever, but wholesale data gathering was never ok.