Of course the "attack" is easy to avoid. But you first have to know about it. Mozilla should not be planting such landmines.

Now let's think about how much users can trust Firefox's VPN service. Multipurpose telemetry being utilized there too?

Good point. Isn’t their VPN just a rebranded Mullvad VPN with a higher price?

The application at least on macOS appears bespoke as it was missing connect on startup and a few other things I rely on so switched to Mullvad.

This isn't a landmine in any normal threat model. The average person is concerned with identity theft and perhaps their local law enforcement, not the full weight of domestic or foreign intelligence services.

It may not concern the "average person", but it contributes to the omnipresent surveillance endangering the extraordinary people we rely on to keep an eye on our governments and corporations.

If we only care about the average person, we may as well have Firefox snitch to the NSA and their Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc. equivalents, plus Microsoft, Google, Raytheon, General Electric,..

The average person fears the domestic intelligence service and is not as concerned with local police.

The thousands of people a year murdered by local police (many of whom are unarmed and innocent) would probably disagree.

You should at least attempt to use real statistics in your comments.

Nothing I said requires a statistic, it is common knowledge US police officers kill roughly 1000 civilians a year on average.

It is also clear from investigative reporting that many police departments have a long history of colluding with local coroners to cover up many additional deaths.

Colin Kaepernick didn't recently start a multimillion dollar fund to aid families of victims in getting secondary independent coroner/autopsy reports without reason.

If the fact that this is necessary doesnt terrify you or the people in your community, then I don't know what to say.

Real statistics that aren't limited to your own jaundiced view of reality I mean.

I haven't seen reliable polling data proving the parent's or my claim. Either of us could be right.

Although, we also haven't seen tens of millions of people protest/petition to defund or reform intelligence services recently.

Without definite data, the fact that we've seen that urgency around local police reform seems like a decent alternate public sentiment indicator.

you’re only off by whatever number of thousands over a thousand you are implying here.

I don’t know whether the OP was thinking of it, but world-wide, it is thousands (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki.... Numbers “include those killed by security forces such as military police and intelligence agents”, but I think removing those would easily keep it ‘thousands’)

Checking the bug tracker, it only does something if you have Firefox Data Collection turned on in the settings. Personally, the first thing I do is turning that off on a fresh install.

considering it sends your unique ID (or download token) during installation, when you disable settings after installation, it's already too late.

it seems there's actually a way to turn it off before installation using enterprise policies, but I have not tried it as I left mozilla's firefox long ago first for waterfox and now librewolf.

I tried that, and it is a time consuming and tedious process which I eventually failed.