Except they actually provide useful features like Firefox Sync. If you opt into that service it is impossible for them to provide it to you withouth having your data on their servers.

They should be transparent about what data they have. There are options like "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" and "Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf" in Firefox, I don't recall if they are enabled by default when you install the browser but I seem to recall that at least one of them is. These options have nothing to do with the Sync feature.

They are transparent. Have a look at their privacy policy: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ It's simple, human-readable language, not even legalese.

I understand that. Those features are not useful at all to me, that's why I said "my" data.

Then you wouldn't sign in to sync. They wouldn't have your data. What was your point again?

>you have no business having my data in the first place...

???

Mozilla doesn't have your data.

The only way Mozilla would ever have any of your data is if you explicitly signed up for one of their services to hold your data for syncing purposes or something.

Unless you very actively said "Take my data please!" at some point, there really are very few things Mozilla would be able to do to get at your data. (In fact, by far the easiest thing for them to do would be to forget about using firefox and just buy the data from Facebook or Google.)

Mozilla has plenty of telemetry that is opt out, not to mention opt-out "experiments" that have collected browsing data and gave it to third parties.

That is not my definition of explicitly signing up for their services.

Curious, let me construct a bit of a straw man. Would you be ok with their data collection if that data was only interaction data? What features are you using, sans tracking features that may reveal who you are and what sites you visit? Assume for the sake of this question that it has been verified by 200 third parties to be the case.

What about bug reports?

I’m just curious if the line is “absolutely no data” or “nothing identifiable to me or my habits”, or something else.

Mozilla the organization are providing to me a piece of software (the browser), which after me downloading it, should have absolutely nothing to do with Mozilla, their services or servers.

Unless, of course, I explicitly instruct the browser to connect there, which is unlikely, because I don't want anything to do with them or with their services.

Firefox does not force you to submit data to them to be useful. Everything can be disabled.

> Everything can be disabled.

If it is enabled by default, then they are doing it wrong.

That's just your opinion. I do not mind sharing data with them by default because I know the data helps their long-term survival. Especially because I know I'm lazy (like most people are) so if it's opt-in I wouldn't bother turning things on.

> I do not mind sharing data

That's just your opinion. Mozilla should be very clear, up front, about what data they collect by default[1], so that users can make educated decisions about whether to allow it. This whole "we promise to protect everything (lol) we collect about you" PR stunt obscures the fact that they are collecting data from users by default.

1. They 'detail' it in the privacy policy, but 1) almost all end users will not see a link to it and 2) almost all end users will not consider that Mozilla is collecting data from them by default.

It should be noted that, though you personally may be consistent about this, most people would consider identical opt-in data sharing on the part of eg Chrome to be evidence of Google's dastardliness. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Mozilla not to take user data by default if they're positioning themselves as privacy-oriented.