I suspect that for every scenario you can think of someone will be able to reply with solid logic about how it could be used in a way that’s bad and/or privacy-violating.

But is though IF it's not up front and center shown to the user. All telemetry can be backtracked to an IP in most cases. That's a bad thing. It's a form of history. It should be a switch that turns ON so that you OPT IN. Not the reverse, nor should it involve having to change a hosts entry.

> Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

How can you tell?

In Firefox:

point your url bar to about:telemetry

It shows you all the data that has been gathered. (Though IIRC it might still show stuff even when you've disabled telemetry -- in that case the data is being aggregated locally but not sent.)

Go to https://telemetry.mozilla.org

To look at the data on the server side. There are more sophisticated ways of querying it, but obviously not everybody can just be handed access to run arbitrary analysis code.

Probe dictionaries:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

Just checked about:telemetry, it seems most data are about CPU and memory stats, nothing related to browsing history.

Mozilla doesn't collect browsing history, period.

You forgot safe browsing.

What about it?

How you probably think it works in Firefox and how it actually works in Firefox are two different things, by the way:

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

As soon as i start firefox on windows it connnects to 1e100.net and makes a lot of connection to this domain even when no page is displayed (just the start screen). This is another reason why i'm in the process of switching from Firefox to another browser. A program shall not initiate network connections if not asked to.

It's open-source software.

That means nothing. Go read the audacity threads pertaining to trying to sneak in Google and some Russian analytics clients.

From the latest Audacity release notes:

>A journaling feature has been added for QA purposes.

What exactly does that mean?

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

That's not what I meant. Search the PRs for the most commented upon PR. It'll invariably be the one about adding Google analytics and telemetry to Audacity.