It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns over the opt-out policy in the mailing list and bugtracker but obviously that doesn't matter.
What matters is that the original suggestion was opt-out.
Of course, rightfully, nobody is going to send a message on the bugtracker or mailing list or otherwise participating to ensure this doesn't happen.
Rather, everyone goes out and yells how terrible Mozilla is and how Google is being nice since they atleast tell you about it upfront. (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development)
I don't think the blog post above accurately represents the current situation on the shield study nor does it reflect how several people engaged on it are trying to prevent this exact kind of PR disaster.
This is, of course, the danger with running a project in public: you don't get to have a private discussion about whether a certain thing is a good idea, and you certainly don't get to have a private discussion about how to phrase it. Views of some individual proposing a thing get attributed to the organization.
I can think of no better way to encourage closed development processes than to get upset at a "statement by a Mozilla person" and use it as a reason to write off the entire project. You have no idea what Google is saying about your privacy behind closed doors.
You're giving Mozilla a bit too much due. This was not just a statement or suggestion but an announcement for the next Monday.
With an internal policy that all opt-out proposals requiring the transfer of personalized data must be discussed with the rest of the team (incl. PR) and publicly, the post would have sounded quite differently.
By the way, in less than three hours, there will be an AMA on /r/firefox with the Project Manager of the User Advocacy team at Mozilla:
Sure - but my reading of the article wasn't that it was so much objecting to the announcement but to the follow-up statement that Nightly users are implicitly opting in to a different privacy profile. That's the sort of statement I would easily see myself making to my team's private mailing list, and getting edited significantly before it goes into a public FAQ. I would expect that someone launching a similar experiment at Chrome/Edge/Safari/etc. would make a similar announcement, and then respond to internal feedback internally.
I see this all the time also. Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version.
Debate, yes, but not 'don't use nightly, sky is falling'.
The reality is that they've given up on all other companies, so people are very sensitive to losing their one remaining chance of privacy, especially if that's the only reason they're using Firefox to begin with.
> Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version.
But, small question: isn't the Nightly an experimental version?
That doesn't make it okay for an opt-out privacy invading study to suddenly be included. You shouldn't silently get less privacy protections simply because you updated.
You're right, Nightly users probably are more savvy so there's no need to decide for them. Lay out what the user's options are and force them to make a choice when the browser starts, don't have a default, and don't have an option preselected.
All this crap has to do with what's okay to do in the absence of clear user intent. If you remove the possibility you don't have to worry.
> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla.
I get the impression that people mostly just hope Mozilla will be better than the rest. Casting aspersions on others' motives doesn't help people like me figure out whether this is a big deal or not.
Here is a simple question, why do Mozilla not have a policy that dictate that any increase in data collection from one version to the next must either be opt-in or follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia), and a clear update to the privacy policy. Bureaucracy can be helpful in creating trust that important changes won't just sneak up on people unannounced.
> documented process with the community, in public
You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.
The original announcement was: "FYI: We're going to do this, next monday", that announcement was on a Saturday. If you think that qualifies then we've different ideas about how this should get discussed.
Even if they meant Monday 26th, that's not a lot of time to have a proper discussion.
So what does that process look like? Is there a formal process with clear method on how and when the decision is made, how it get propagate into a decision and how the documentation and announcement to users will be?
Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list.
Certainly not 'lengthy', and I don't think "with the community". The initial state of this was two-day warning saying "this is happening Monday", which might count as prior notice but certainly isn't a dialogue.
Thank you (and chuckharmston above). The policy is rather significant to the discussion and a major starting point in discussing this kind of additional collection in firefox.
Going by the bug report for the TRR, I am seeing that the request did not follow all the questions in the request form such as #3. Additionally the bug ticket got a science review but its unclear if that qualify as a "data steward" reviewing it, and there is no Data Review Form as specified by the policy. It is unclear from the ticket in which category of data collection the ticket should be classified under and if the opt-out is correctly applied in this case.
As for the data collection policy itself, I am not seeing a few key questions that as a user I would like to know in order to inspire trust in the project. How long is the data retained? What anonymizing technique if any is applied? Is there a minimum time for discussion so that enough time is given for people to discover the ticket and contribute?
Oh yeah because it’s been totally stagnant! Right guys? Oh because it reports all the telemetry by default back to Microsoft, oh shit that’s edge. Because it’s been breaking web standards and trying to make the world chrome rather than being a world player. Ah got it.
You're not getting it, the parent comment realized something I realized. Like Chrome adding API's that are unofficial or not supported whatsoever. There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
> There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns.
But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser.
My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.
And Google is one of the worst. Google Hangout's replacement, Meet, is Chrome only. Can't even fake it out with headers or such, the software doesn't give you a chance.
I think this is important. In the bad old days, I always developed in Firefox. I made a point of following standards. I despised IE.
I still use Firefox as my personal browser, but some recent development I have done has been in Chrome. Mostly because Firefox is missing one critical feature for that project. It's not quite in the standard yet. It is Stage 3 with TC39[0].
Stage 3 means, "The solution is complete and no further work is possible without implementation experience, significant usage and external feedback."
So they need browsers to implement it and provide feedback. Chrome has had it since v63. Firefox has had a bug for it for more than a year, but no public progress. Node will have it next month.
I chose to move ahead on it six months ago, figuring Firefox would be on board before I was ready to release. I was wrong. But I'm not going back. Partly for the same reason I stubbornly developed in Firefox during the IE years. This one feature is all that prevents my code from working in Firefox. They will get there eventually. I will not go back to giant build frameworks and bundlers and code splitters and transpilers and gigabytes of tooling. My code works now without those. I look forward to Firefox stepping into this world. I'm eager for that to happen. In the meantime, my users can use Chrome.
There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
Oh, no. That must be prevented. Like, if they made it so gmail and google docs only worked with Chrome, now that practically everybody has moved to gmail.... There would be no defense of such a move.
Oh, I don't know. It seems Mozilla wants people to be outraged at itself. You may say that all this isn't reason enough, but I'm thinking that someday I was quite a Mozilla fanboy, and now I don't even know what browser to use… And it doesn't seem like I'm alone.
Presumably it's a reference to the way peak-usage IE created custom requirements and ignored established standards - partly to undermine other browsers, partly just because they were too big to care.
Chrome defaulted top-level event listeners to passive with no real warning or discussion. Chrome no longer passes Acid 3 like it used to. I'm not a web-dev, but I know the list goes on at some length.
So the concern here, whatever its merit, is that Chrome is now undermining other browsers and changing the web for its own benefit.
> The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns
Wasn’t the famous “Looking Glass” an ad packed as a Shield study and delivered also to Firefox Developer version and even release (not even only Nightly)?
I however don’t expect (and have never expected) Nightly to behave identically as the Release, so I don’t understand that some do expect that, like the OP. The Nightly is your contribution to the development, and obviously its use data aren’t supposed to be “super secret.”
While looking glass was indeed delivered in release (to my knowledge) the code was not active until configuration changes were made, at worst that means mozilla delivered unnecessary bloat to the user.
While I do agree that Nightly is to some extend "we need crash reports with a list of all the pornhub tabs you had open", I think in this case they should inform users that they are doing this. The study only lasts a week so people can fallback to normal mozilla if they don't like the potential to be the 50% being "tracked".
I hope Mozilla takes this as an opportunity to A) give the networking team a lecture on how to not word a shield study proposal and B) do something to avoid people thinking all shield studies are bad. They aren't.
Because the option C) is "people should learn not to only read the first message in a proposal discussion and assume this is how they will do it" I find it unlikely that it will be possible, given the modern outrage culture in social media.
> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla.
Nothing else seems to be working. Some users are against Mozillas forced default tracking/telemetry system and forced install of crust that should really be add-ons (Pocket, sync).
If you have any ideas for ways users can enable change which doesn't inconvenience you then please let them know.
Participate in the mailing lists, in the bug trackers.
Submit code patches and report bugs.
In short, participate in the Mozilla community.
Mozilla isn't some sort of impenetrable wall of silence, everything they do is open. The initial mailing list thread that start the entire outrage is open. People on it raised these exact concerns. People engaged them. They want to prevent these exact PR disasters.
"Nothing else seems to be working" is simply untrue if you simply look at the bugtracker and mailing list.
I would suggest that you bring "Nothing else seems to be working" to Google and the Chrome dev team. I haven't heard much outcry from that direction yet and they regularly come up with decisions previously undiscussed with the public and then push it through no arguments about it. Mozilla is not like that no matter how much you want to believe it.
For anyone looking on and thinking of following this advice, please don't treat Bugzilla like GitHub, where advocacy and general discussion is the norm. Bugzilla is for code reviews and for people who are otherwise working together so they can coordinate and get things done. It's not an open solicitation for people to jump in and voice their opinions about general project directions, etc. If you do try to use Bugzilla the wrong way, you'll likely be warned about generating too much noise and possibly banned.
Please do continue using social platforms like blogs, comment sites like this one, etc. for posting opinion pieces and weighing in. That's where general commentary belongs, and it'll be much more effective to boot, if you're interested in getting people's attention or changing minds.
> That is incorrect. Many bug reports are marked as private for security reasons.
Maybe you don't know how this works. Most (almost all) employees do not have access to these bugs, either. But community members can and do have access.
Early access to these reports can be worth literally millions of dollars in the wrong hands, and cause much more damage to our users. However, who gets access isn't decided by who gets a paycheck. It's decided by who is involved and participating and trustworthy. That can be literally anybody.
Bugs are also marked private without any security angle involved whatsoever. Often, these are related to initiatives done in cooperation with so-called "partners".
For an open source project, Mozilla appears to constantly settle on pretty shitty partners if it is true (as is alleged) that it's these partners that insist on secret communication shielded from any community interaction.
Such shady deals in smoke-filled backrooms are one of the small number of things that are hard to impossible to pull off in a community-driven project without constantly pissing off contributors.
Er... pretty much everybody in pretty much all industries prefer keeping their internal communications and their communications with their clients/providers private. Mozilla is one of the only industry actors who manages to keep most of its communications public.
No server-side code. No mobile apps. No public word on when this is going to happen. Yet, this proprietary technology is further integrated into Firefox.
This is honestly the reason I do use Nightly. I'm volunteering to provide information that I understand could be very intimate in hopes it's useful to Mozilla in making Firefox better. Data drives better decisions, and I'd rather the technically savvy volunteer their privacy than it being extracted from the general populace.
So yes, kick me a bit, I'll let you know what breaks.
Same here. Call me naive all you want, but I do think Mozilla has our best intention. They won't sell the data, they will try to keep it as secure as possible and anonymize it. As seen they even made a deal with Cloudflare to ensure they don't log any of that data.
I'm a strong advocate for privacy but if I'm going to give away my data I'd rather have it be Mozilla than Facebook or Google.
Yeah, totally agree. Mozilla needs user data like this for their product, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable solution to collect it from Nightly users who have opted into being guinea pigs.
> I'm a strong advocate for privacy but if I'm going to give away my data I'd rather have it be Mozilla than Facebook or Google.
Yep. There's no company I trust more than Mozilla when it comes to handling my data in a safe and responsible manner.
Sure that's all fine if you are aware of it and agree with it.
Isn't it the same as Cambridge Analytica? That was a feature of Facebook to share your friend information... it still makes it bad.
The fact that Mozilla has good intention doesn't change how it was done. Secrecy isn't the solution, it only pushes toward these kinds of publications and outrage. If it was known, believe me, we wouldn't be here having that discussion, it would be a non-issue.
But in the absence of this news article, you couldn't have been more specific about the information you're volunteering without initiating further research yourself.
I do think Firefox/Mozilla should be explicit about the current list of experiments.
The full quote, since I think that the author of this post cherry-picked unfairly:
>> As one of the folks who brought up the initial concern let me be clear that at this point my only real concern here is one of optics. The DoH service we're using is likely more private than anything the user is currently using.
> It isn't explicit right now that using nightly means opting in to participating in studies like this, and I think the text of the download page antedates our ability to do those studies. The text of the Firefox privacy page says that prerelease products "may contain different privacy characteristics" than release, but doesn't enumerate them. I also can't find a public-facing description of how we handle, secure and audit PII data in experiments involving partner organizations.
> In both cases I'm confident we have solid policies and protocols there, I just don't see a way to point a concerned user to that information.
There's really no good forward if you're stuck in where the author is.
Either you upgrade and lose several important addons, and functionality in other addons. These are often what makes Firefox a good browser (for you).
The second option is to downgrade to ESR, which will delay the need to upgrade for a few more months. This may invalidate parts of your profile. It also means you lose out on a number of significant performance improvements included in 56.
And the last option, of course, the author's choice (which recommend against): staying on 56. This is of course a bad idea for the reason you stated, plus you lose out on future performance improvements and possibly new web technologies. You will also keep getting nagged by Firefox to upgrade.
So, there is no good option, and you have to pick your poison: Upgrade past 57 suffer significant amounts of usability/efficiency, downgrade to 52 and lose parts of your profile and get significantly worse performance, or stay on 56 and risk the browser getting compromised.
I hate to victim blame, but he's entirely at fault for the predicament he's in. It was widely known that legacy extensions would be phased out it 56, and a few searches related to firefox 56 will tell you that ESR would be the only branch that supports both legacy extensions AND will recieve security patches past 56. So he should have switched over to ESR before 53 came out.
Your comment is somewhat out of place in this case; Firefox ESR 52 is the current up-to-date ESR¹ release. Firefox ESR is kept up-to-date with security patches, just like the vanilla evergreen Firefox. The difference is that the ESR is branched yearly from the main-line, and leaves out all functional patches — only security patches get applied.
This helps organizations who want to test all their tools before moving to a new version. The next ESR release (Firefox ESR 60) will be this summer.
I think that comment was agreeing with my comment, which was written with the understanding that 52 ESR would be better than 56 because the ESR is not out of date the way 56 is.
I understand the desire for statistics, but they should make it more obvious that nightly isn't just daily builds from master. I've run Nightly from time to time and had no idea it was automatically opting in to Shield studies.
Both this and the Mr. Robot extension issue a few months ago erode my trust in Mozilla a little. Counterpoint: only god knows what Google is sending itself from Chrome!
Exactly where I'm at. I get the impression that there's an (probably unintentional/unconscious) attitude at Mozilla that they can use user devices for whatever they like providing they can justify it as providing _some_ future benefit to them. That's probably not actually the case, but it's certainly how their actions make it look.
I don't exactly trust Google any further, but I at least feel they are more upfront about their intention and don't push seemingly arbitrary experiments out to users or involve third parties in the data collection.
> I don't exactly trust Google any further, but I at least feel they are more upfront about their intention and don't push seemingly arbitrary experiments out to users
How do you know what experiments Google is running on unsuspecting Chrome users right now? This conversation arose precisely because Mozilla announced it on a public mailing before the experiment started. You can see any current or past Firefox experiments that you've been in on Firefox's about:studies page.
A more charitable assessment might be that Mozilla is trying to serve too many use-cases. Chrome is quite happy doing the 20% work that gets them 80% of the userbase, and all the users that Chrome happily sidelines come running to Firefox.
That's cool, but some of those users have wildly different priorities, like we see in this case. Some users want protection from interference by their government or their ISP, and couldn't care less if some of their metadata winds up in a database on the other side of the world. Other users are quite relaxed about their local government or ISP, but don't want any of their stuff entering US jurisdiction. And it's not practical to set up a world-wide infrastructure of DNS-over-HTTPS servers just to find out whether it's worthwhile.
It's not so much that Mozilla feels "they can use user devices for whatever they like", as much as Mozilla's at a local maximum, and trying to improve anything for some part of their userbase means neglecting some other part, even if only temporarily. And then the neglected parts feel betrayed.
> Both this and the Mr. Robot extension issue a few months ago erode my trust in Mozilla a little.
Maybe good to know: the Mr. Robot extension did not send anything anywhere or otherwise did anything unless you explicitly flipped a switch manually in about:config. The thing that was bad about it was that it was listed among your extensions, making it look like a virus, but otherwise it was harmless.
And that it was a marketing campaign produced in partnership with a television show that somehow wound up in Firefox. What it did or didn't actually do is almost beside the point to those of us who care.
Even Google, an advertising company, is not so brazen as to market third-parties in its own browser.
I think that the change mentioned in the post is about 'use cloudflare for DNS rather than whatever your local DNS is'.
That has advantages and disadvantages - most people use a DNS automatically configured by the ISP they are using. That might be an untrustworthy DNS from a local access point, or a logging DNS at your ISP. Do you trust cloudflare or BT/comcast less?
Where it gets a bit more worrying is - if you specifically use a DNS from your VPN to prevent DNS leaks? Will this even play nice with 'signin page on free wifi served by DNS redirect'.
It was perfectly clear to me - I felt like they go out of their way to tell you that using Nightly collects some data about your browsing to make Firefox better. That's literally how they advertise using Nightly.
Assume that Chrome is tracking as much as it possibly can, within the bounds set by the privacy policy. The same goes for all products by big IT companies.
The difference here is that you expect Google to collect -a lot- of data about you and your browsing habits. You can also be quite sure that they'll want to keep that data to themselves.
When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further.
> When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further.
As stated in the mailing list thread linked in the article, Mozilla has a legal agreement with Cloudflare that the data will not be stored long-term, let alone sold or shared. My reading is that they're keeping information about DNS requests and responses, but not who made the request, for 24 hours for debugging purposes, and then getting rid of all logs. The data they're actually interested in is performance, not the DNS flow itself.
You're welcome to decide that Mozilla's trust in other companies is misplaced even if they get a signed contract, and if you do, that would be a good reason to cease using Firefox (Nightly or otherwise!). But if you're not of that opinion, it doesn't make sense to worry that the data simply happens to go through a third party.
(Also, what third parties see your DNS data today? Do you think your ISP is not tracking this?)
> You can also be quite sure that they'll want to keep that data to themselves.
I've traditionally made the same argument. I still mostly believe it WRT Google. Facebook's current woes with Cambridge Analytica has hurt my confidence in this some.
I'm ok as long as they make it up front and clear. It's not meant to have the "latest greatest" - it's meant to collect analytics to understand and respond to where changes in the nightly might have broken something critical.
That said, a large chunk of the web is getting very personal. So I'm not sure Mozilla's rights to do as they please matter if the venn-diagram between nightly-users and privacy-stalwarts is anywhere near 30% overlap.
I agree. They can send my data wherever they want - as long as they tell me about it so that I can make an informed decision.
Now, nightly is nightly - you don't accidentally build and install it on your system.
But if this behavior is included in other pre-release versions (such as the developer edition), the need for informing the user becomes even more important. I've installed the developer edition from the Arch linux User Repository (AUR), which means that I don't see any release notes or information boxes on the developer edition website when I'm getting the software.
A small popup in a corner telling me that "There's a new way to help improve firefox" after an upgrade/install would solve this. I don't want 15 levels of confirmation and a roll of tin foil - I just want something informing me that my data will be sent to a new receiver, and why.
> Mozilla's apparent goal of using Nightly users as a captive pool of test dummies.
I thought that it is the main purpose of Nightly, roughly paraphrased but overall accurate.
I'm using it as my semi-primary ("work") browser and from the day one I live in faith that 1) it may stop working any time 2) there is some Mozillian peeking over my shoulder all the time (figuratively).
Man running an old, insecure version of Firefox with several unpatched critical security issues is outraged at DNS hostnames being sent to a US company (in a more secure manner no less). Ok.
I don't see the problem actually, if I want a normal browser I can do my online banking in, for sure, I won't use the nightly version. To me, nightly means, anything could happen.
Mozilla should be careful about EU's GDPR. Under GDPR, explicit user authorization is needed for every use of personal data. An opt-out does not comply with the law. Nor does a blanket TOS or Privacy Policy.
I trust Mozilla has done the diligence to handle the data correctly. If I didn't trust Mozilla I wouldn't use Nightly or even Firefox. I use Nightly because I want to help Mozilla test and make Firefox better. For me that includes opting-in to studies, reporting bugs, and helping test about:config flags they mention in their Nightly blog.
When you first run Firefox, it shows the following page describing the types of telemetry data Firefox shares and a button to configure your telemetry options if you'd like to change them:
The eye-catching headline in huge type, is "at Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet".
Only later in this document -- that basically no one is going to read in detail after reading the headline -- do they detail how they intend to not respect my privacy.
Let's be clear: this is a dark pattern with intention to mislead. Mozilla has serious and growing issues with respecting user privacy by default, and judging by the recent roadmap, it seems like it's going to get worse.*
I can understand mistakes like Mr. Robot, mistakes happen.
But I can't understand an explicit company policy.
I have opted in Firefox's data collection every time I was asked. But such data gathering should always be opt-in. Ask in a nice way and you'll get contributors. And if not, well that should give you a hint that you shouldn't do it.
You're better than this, really. It's why I use Firefox. So please stop it with the mistakes.
That's what the mail thread this article was referring to was discussing: how can they properly communicate this, and the privacy safeguards they put in place, to the user?
I wonder why Mozilla is lately so fond of collecting user data. Do they have a new data mining department which is looking for work? Did someone tell them to do data driven development/marketing?
If they really want to know more about what we are doing, they could just ask us, don't they? I mean, something like building a FF extension which offers to participate in a monthly survey and at the end of each survey it can ask which data the user wants to attach to his survey responses this one time.
And if they ask the users for all hosts they have visited during the last month, many people will ask what Mozilla wants to do with that data and Mozilla can explain their intent so that everybody can decide if he wants to support that cause.
Yes, that would probably yield much less data and would be more cumbersome for Mozilla, but in the end it would be a fair way of letting your users participate in the development process. As users we want a product which we can trust 100% that it will keep our data on our computer as long as we don't explicitly say otherwise.
Plenty of people are concerned about any US based company having access to their DNS logs; even with the pro-privacy agreement CloudFlare have in place with Mozilla, the US government has past form of doing bulk data collection from US based companies.
Your ISP's DNS may well be covered by relatively strong data protection laws (versus those in the US) and don't lead to a foreign government gaining access to all your browsing history, even if in principle they could be MitM'd.
You manually opt in to 8.8.8.8. You may be using something with stronger legal protections than Cloudflare and will not be aware you need to opt out of this. The strength of encryption on the network is irrelevant if you don't trust the recipient.
Hate me for that, but my opinion is that there is no reason for using Firefox at all anymore. Mozilla as company have decided that honesty, dignity and loyalty towards their origin user base was less important than the hopeless try to defeat Google Chrome and take their place in market share.
All what Mozilla does is simplifying the browser, removing every single bit of more advanced customization features to be most attractive to the typical mainstream user who thinks that customization, features and choice is bloat and should have no part inside the product.
How should i as wary user ever have faith in Mozilla as i see what they have been doing since 2013?
If they want to be so badly like Google Chrome, then i can also use the original instead.
I - as being loosely connected to the Anonymous collective - value morality most. And that morality... Mozilla has thrown over board without thinking twice about it.
Seems like multiple issues with Firefox (Cliqz and now this). FF's new privacy policy has so many exceptions that it makes it challenging to read: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
The Brave browser seems to be carrying the torch for privacy these days:
Brave is not in the business of selling personal information. We believe the best way to ensure your private personal information is protected is to make every effort to ensure we are not receiving your private personal information in the first place.
IMO, this blog post is needlessly alarmist and even misleading.
On the pre-release FF downloads page [1] it says, "Firefox Nightly automatically sends feedback to Mozilla." Not sure how the author of this post got the impression that Nightly _doesn't_ collect user metrics and analytics, but this is its explicit purpose.
If the author really cares about privacy, he should just use the main Firefox release or, even better, something like Waterfox or PaleMoon.
But please - don't slam Mozilla for creating dedicated analytics and tracking release channels and then using those channels for, you know, analytics and tracking.
Well, I'm glad OP pointed out that nightly might do unexpected things with my browsing habit information in order to gather data on browser use in nightly- I admit, I hadn't really thought that through.
It won't stop me from using it for development browsing and some other things, but it might give me pause before visiting some sites I suppose (so I would switch browsers).
My problem with nightly is that it doesn't automatically update, so I have to reinstall every day. And I'm just too lazy (errr, "busy") to be bothered with that. Is there away around this issue on Mint (Ubuntu)? I even put a menu entry into my "shortcuts" menu on fluxbox, but it's nightly from December or something.
Firefox profiles are a hard thing to discover. When you start Developer Edition Firefox up by default it starts in its own profile. I'd guess Nightly does the same too. Regardless, it'd be nice of Mozilla to make profiles more accessible through the default UI. I've set up my FF to start with the profile selector every time I start it up, but in firefox in order to switch profiles one has to go to about:profiles.
Frankly big name FOSS projects have developed a massive paternalist streak over the last decade or so.
This in complete ignorance that what attracted people to them in the first place was to escape the paternalism (and black box nature of proprietary software) from the likes of Microsoft.
DNS over HTTPS being skewed into a bad thing is a new one for me. How could this be worse than sending it in plain text to any other entity? At least in this case it's going to be limited to Cloudflare and not whoever's watching in between.
If this is part of what it takes to get this technology rolled out, then do what it takes imo.
Hmm, it's not great they intend to send this information to the great firewall in the sky. If it were mozilla's own servers, I'd re-enable the usage collection on nightly.
Bit more of the same with the screencapture features, it's a shame we can't host and configure our own services....
I'm using them on Developer Edition, although I think I had to install an extension that makes use of them (in my case, Tab Center Redux) in order to enable them.
The GDPR is only a momth away, I've already sent a complaint to the local data privacy officer about Firefox' constant violations of the requirement for explicit consent (see: CliqZ before), so let's hope the hammer swings hard this time.
If Mozilla still can't see why they shouldn't automatically transmit analytics and studies for everything, they deserve to be sued into the ground. Same with Google.
Some people just want to see the world burn. So maybe let's delete the whole internet and get back to letters, telegrams, pidgins and encyclopaedias? No one is forcing you to use dev, nightly or anything else if it is not consistent with your faith. Especially Mozilla they made some silly things but are one of the most "privacy and shit" companies out there and they will not come to your house and beat you because you do not want to do something.
Extending your argument only a bit, "No one is forcing you to use Firefox stable release version if it is not consistent with your faith". "No one is forcing you to use computers and internet if they are not consistent with your faith". I see so much irony in your statement. It's not about forcing anyone. It's about taking the web forward, and data security which Mozilla says it believes in. Nightly definitely means there could be unintentional mistakes and bugs, but does not mean it has our blanket agreement to intentionally sharing all of our private data by default.
> No one is forcing you to use Firefox stable release version if it is not consistent with your faith
Nope. Debian repos (and most package managers I'd guess) do not have Nightly or Developer Edition. There's no direct link on the download page [1] that takes you to where you can download the Nightly branch. And the page for downloading it [2], to which you reach if you search for it specifically, makes it as visible as it gets that it's beta and meant for testing. I guess all of this is just lightly forcing you to download latest release. (edit: I mean this as sth. positive BTW, they're making it quite obvious which is the wiser option for the end user)
No matter what way of installing you choose they inform you via official website about pre-release version witch includes notice about sending automatic feedback. You don't need to prove your point in the most bizarre way and you can inform PPA admin to add this little line for clarification.
Installing via PPA is much more common and trusted than installing a random binary from a random website.
> to add this little line for clarification.
That’s too late anyway, from May 8 on the GDPR comes into force, and then this will require explicit opt-in from the user, and the rest of the software has to continue working even if the user does not explicitly opt-in.
So, I’ll just wait for that. Also waiting for the day that the analytics on about:addons becomes explicitly opt-in, instead of being connected to the DNT setting.
Firefox is open source software. They can not control every single person distributing their software. That PPA is probably maintained by volunteers or Ubuntu folk.
So how do you want take web forward without testing new things based on real life data? Did you even read what they want to do and how they are going to do it?
Seriously they have to? Isn't this obvious enough? When downloading TEST RELEASE you willingly accept that it will collect anonymous data and send it to them. If you do not want to test something, because you're opposed to it, do not do it.
A lot of companies do that and I do not see anyone complaining about it for example Apple and macOS betas.
I just received this email from my bank. Something like this would be nice:
"Below is a link to the 2018 Annual Privacy Notice. This Notice provides details on the types of information we collect, why we collect it, and with whom we may share it. Collecting and permissible sharing of your information allows us to offer you a comprehensive range of services to help you meet your financial goals. "
Yes, for stable version if they want to track something more. But we are talking about test version. You accept this when downloading "Firefox Nightly automatically sends feedback to Mozilla.": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#telemetry
How you want to improve something without data? Based on intuitions?
You are using Nightly "wrong" because of attachment to old extensions that will perish in June when all legacy stuff will be blocked. Nightly is only for testing out new features and it's not intended to be production ready browser... but everyone has an own use case. Yet do not beat them for wanting to change something for the better after using testing technology.
Even today, every new feature you want to have in the WebExtension API needs to be implemented as a legacy extension providing this API first, then it will get tested, and then it will maybe become part of core Firefox.
The official process to add apis for WebExtensions is to write a legacy extension.
Which is exactly what I'm doing to support my custom extension that replaces the entire history and bookmarking system, UI and toolbars of Firefox, for which I need a custom API.
I suggest you read the wiki on why nightly still supports legacy extensions before judging people.
I'm not judging I wrote that everyone has it's own use case. My only point is don't use test version if you don't want to be tested or opt-out of it. ;)
I can only imagine how smug your smile was when you typed out "local data privacy officer" wondering how many chills you were about to send down Mozilla's spine.
Lots of HNers are going to be let down in about one month.
The mills of bureaucracy run slow, I realize that.
But it's the office of my local data privacy officer that has in the past sued basically every website in Germany for using the Facebook/Twitter like buttons, and won (and caused them all to use a two-click share button system).
I've got trust in them that they'll act responsibly on this.
On a foreign company that has been distributing a software in this jurisdiction that does not comply with local data privacy law, specifically the requirement for explicit notification before any tracking happens, and, starting May 8, the explicit opt-in for any kind of analytics or telemetry that may contain personally identifying data.
See: about:addons using Google Analytics without cookie disclaimer or opt-out ability, CliqZ addon receiving parts of browsing history without disclaimer, or any opt-in/-out, unauthorized installation of software on a remote computer (Mr Robot case), and much more.
What matters is that the original suggestion was opt-out.
Of course, rightfully, nobody is going to send a message on the bugtracker or mailing list or otherwise participating to ensure this doesn't happen.
Rather, everyone goes out and yells how terrible Mozilla is and how Google is being nice since they atleast tell you about it upfront. (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development)
I don't think the blog post above accurately represents the current situation on the shield study nor does it reflect how several people engaged on it are trying to prevent this exact kind of PR disaster.