How could Mozilla respect the needs of users who opt-out of Mozilla knowing they, and their needs, exist at all?

How could any creator of anything?

If you can't identify who your users are, you can't ask them questions, and you can't tell if they're "vocal 0.001%" or "vocal 40%" of your userbase — then what consideration could you give, as a software developer, for their needs?

You can refuse to change, and simply always offer the one thing you offer, and accept that you're the best option for a minority of users over time. You can continue developing to your own needs, and let them stay or go as they see fit. You can try to read the tea leaves of internet forum posts, but that comes with a huge penalty to significance. You can try new things and try to tell from the howls of outrage whether it's a wording error or a direction error or simply "change is bad, I hate you all".

Opting out is not free. Opting out comes at a price to you. Your needs will be less likely to be considered, and your solutions may change in ways that are not to your liking. You have every right to opt out, but is the price of that acceptable to you?

ps. If you can solve how to let users of something influence its creator in a fair and just manner, such that all users have equal influence, while opting out of being known to that creator to exist at all, you will be a billionaire within five years.

I'd ask for feedback, and when that feedback is given freely, even when unsolicited, I'd take it on board and act accordingly. I would ask if people want to participate in "telemetry" and "studies", not assume they do without affirmative prior consent.

Mozilla is breathtakingly bad at this. They're about as responsive to feedback as GNOME/Freedesktop.

I most certainly would not put spyware in the product and turn it on without asking first. I'd most certainly never get myself into a situation where an oversight can simultaneously break every copy of my software ever deployed.

This idea that you require all copies of your software to phone home to make effective development decisions is bunk. We got along just fine without that garbage for decades.

How about surveys or well, common sense?

I'm a tech oriented person who cares about privacy. I want software that is lightweight, configurable, with sensible defaults. For any features besides the basic functionality (in this case: browsing the web), I don't want to opt-out, I want to opt-in.

Privacy oriented means for me that the software I use doesn't send one bit of data that isn't necessary for its basic functionality. I use a "dumb phone" because of this. I never understood how anybody can think telemetry and privacy can co-exist.

I want a Firefox without Pocket, Send, Screenshot Tools, Sync, Clickz, any cloud based service. I only want a fast, lightweight browser that doesn't send any unnecessary data anywhere without me explicitly configuring it. That's a sensible default for me, really. Software used to be like that.

I'd also like to configure when my software looks for updates. My Linux distro let's me do that.

And it would be awesome if all other functionality (like Send/Sync/Pocket, etc.) is available via optional plugins, or in another "full-featured" version of Firefox. The deluxe edition or whatever.

I believe I'm not alone with these ideas about software. In discussions about Firefox these things always come up. There are github projects [1,2] with 1600 and 1200 stars about hardening Firefox. People care about privacy. It's not hard to find this part of the userbase.

The idea that you can't create software for your users without telemetry, is what leads Mozilla to disregard their privacy oriented users in the first place. It's depressing.

And even if I allowed telemetry on my system Mozilla wouldn't learn anything about what I wrote here. It's useless.

1: https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/ 2: https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js

Telemetry doesn't tell you why users do anything. They would have to ask, which doesn't require telemetry. There used to be a form for submitting feedback.

> How could Mozilla respect the needs of users who opt-out of Mozilla knowing they, and their needs, exist at all?

Because of the values and principles that Mozilla used to share with its users, the principles that underpinned the first implemenation of Firefox Sync and were completely abandoned in the current implementation.

I trusted Mozilla because they didn't require our trust. They understood this principle and designed their systems in accordance with it.

They're burning half-a-billion a year of Google's money, they can afford to have an intern run filters to capture stories on HN, reddit, slashdot, ... amalgamate the main points and make them available as part of the user feedback.

Presumably many of the devs at Mozilla have been using it for the last 15 years too and also value a privacy-centric advertising-lite web.

This whole situation isn't ideal but it's absurd to me that people are upset about hotfixes for a bug that they found extremely inconvenient. Do you like the bug or not? The option to turn off the system they used for hotfixes is right there in the privacy settings and they even show you what it's currently being used for (and what it was used for in the past). Like it or not, as far as I know every major browser (maybe not Safari?) is doing the exact same thing except they're less transparent about it.

I have literally no idea how to identify what experiments and rollout flags are quietly turned on for my install of Chrome and not for other people because it's not documented anywhere. At least in Firefox the option is right there and so is info on what the option does.

"No opt-out telemetry" is a great idea that doesn't function in the real world. If you ship online-connected software with 1m+ users that doesn't have a way to deploy hotfixes or a killswitch for dangerous features or basic telemetry, that is incredible negligence because all it takes is a single bug or a single unanticipated act by a third party and you're DDoSing someone or causing other kinds of mayhem. I'm quite serious. This is why most vendors operating at Mozilla's scale have the same set of tools at their disposal, even if they don't tell you about it. You cannot deploy large-scale connected software in the real world without doing this. It's one thing to go 'Word shouldn't have any telemetry' (okay, sure) and another to go 'this app that connects to thousands of servers, is left open all the time, and runs remote code should not have any telemetry or automatic update mechanism'. The latter is naive on the level of 'just don't write any bugs and your software won't need updates'.

The right way to do this is to push a new release, which they've done. The absolutely wrong way to do this is to silently push a fix through a back door that's open by default and rightly shouldn't exist in the first place.

Yes, you can do things more efficiently when you ignore the rules and subvert reasonable expectations. Generally though, society takes a dim view of this.

>If you ship online-connected software with 1m+ users that doesn't have a way to deploy hotfixes ..

That way is checking for updates, and then asking me if I want to install them. Most software does this and it works fine. There are no privacy implications for hitting an API for a number and checking locally if it's higher than a number I have. All clean, all above-board.

That way is emphatically NOT playing like a sneak and making changes silently and remotely without asking me about it first. I don't care what you think your good reason is, you don't have the ethical/moral right to make changes on my property without that affirmative consent.

If what we see here is how you think Mozilla treats its users well, I'd hate to see what it would take to get you to agree they treat them badly.

I see nothing but naked contempt. YMMV.

If you see all instances of someone disagreeing with your ethical and logical judgements as naked contempt, then you will never be able to perceive anyone’s true motivations, in order to argue your case more persuasively and find out whether they understand your views.

Outrage has jumped the shark. Everyone disagrees about everything, which is hard enough to address without declaring “naked contempt” any time a choice is made that isn’t in your favor.