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A comment on Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android. Parent comment

Re:Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android by aclsid on Saturday August 19, 2017 @01:56AM (#15051918)
Reading that link it says nothing about disabling Google analytics, which is what the parent post implies is at play here. It is not clear that is the case, but if it is, the disable button does nothing to help you.

Firefox's about:config does not seem to work on FF Focus either.

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Re:Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android by st3fan on Saturday August 19, 2017 @08:09AM (#15052951)
Focus does not use Google Analytics. I dont understand how people came to that conclusion. Focus does not talk to any Google services at all.

There is no Google Analytics in Focus. Check the source code please to verify this.

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Re:Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android by kuschku on Saturday August 19, 2017 @11:04AM (#15053768)
Focus uses Adjust, Adjust uses com.google.android.gms:play-services-analytics.

Ergo, Focus uses com.google.android.gms:play-services-analytics.

Ergo, Focus talks to certain Google Services.

If you recursively import a proprietary binary, it still ends up in the resulting apk. I’ve checked the APK, the Google Analytics libary ends up in it, and it is not in any way sandboxed from the rest of the browser.

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Re:Firefox Focus – A new private browser for iOS and Android by st3fan on Saturday August 19, 2017 @11:07AM (#15053790)
It may end up in the APK but that does not mean it is actually used. This is the unfortunate side effect of pulling in dependencies with dependencies.

I can assure you that Adjust does not talk to google analytics behind our backs. It may have that option, but we did not configure it to use that functionality. What would it talk to, we did not configure an API key.

I will find out if we can remove this dependency to avoid confusion.

Filed https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/issues/1174

(And for completeness, Adjust source code at https://github.com/adjust/android_sdk)

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