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.
Well shit. I left telemetry on because I liked Firefox and didn’t mind helping the developers with their free software. I very much mind helping marketers. I’m really curious what exactly is being shared.
But I’ve already moved on to Waterfox and Librewolf on everything but my phone.Put Waterfox on your phone! It’s been great for me.
Same. If you don’t enable telemetry, how are they supposed to know if a feature is popular?
Meanwhile, they’re selling the data to fucking ad networks. Scum.
on a de-identified and aggregated basis
Ehh can’t say I care too much, especially since you’ve always been able to turn it off
Draaaaaamaaa
right?!? Just go to Firefox Data Collection and Use, and decide if you want to unclick “Allow Firfox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla”. nbd
But that’s a looooooooot of work, though. Like I did it a long time ago, but my hand muscles still hurt all these years later. :(
Read the post and I don’t understand how the author reached the conclusion that this has been happening since 2017. They enabled telemetry by default in 2017, but there’s no proof that data started being sold starting then.
Did you see that the privacy policy was updated to use Technical & Interaction data to “suggest relevant content”?
It’s a package deal.
The “suggest relevant content” refers to their sponsors like websites that show up on the front page. It’s not evidence that they actually sold that data to other companies.
To get rewarded for having those sponsors, Mozilla needs to inform those sponsors that its users clicked the sponsors. How would they do that without sending data about how many users clicked the sponsors? Any monetization of an Internet feature requires some form of tracking to be implemented.
Look in the feedback section for my response to this.
I’m a little confused about where we disagree - but it might make it simpler to clarify that I said “shared”, not sold. That seems to be exactly what they are saying in the privacy notices from both 2017 and today.
Whether it was sold and what that entailed isn’t something we’re going to be able to know without Mozilla telling us.
There’s a big difference, the old privacy policy is written like Mozilla processed that data themselves to suggest sponsors, not that they shared that data with other companies.
I agree - so the question is if anything changed – Mozilla has said that they are just clarifying their existing usage of data. Hence my read. Yes, this implies that Mozilla was previously deceptive and is being more transparent today, but that is also what they are saying.
If you disagree, I’d be curious to see where we see that Mozilla has explained that the new Privacy Notice is describing new practices by Mozilla rather than a clarification of their existing practice – basically, why do you believe that.
