- Who tells you that Mozilla won't do it?
- Criminal should know better than to use Chrome and Firefox, at least not without additional protection, and it includes disabling telemetry in both products.
I am not saying that Google can't do anything bad to me, I just trust that they won't. Answering the other comment about Nest camera, I didn't see any example of Google actually handing out data to police without a warrant, they are just saying that they can. I already know that they can, what I want to know is what they did. I also have no real reason to fear Mozilla, and I left telemetry enabled.
But I think that if you really want people to take your commitment to privacy seriously, "I collect data but trust me, I won't do anything bad" is not enough, I want that of course, but I also want technical commitment, and telemetry that is not strictly opt-in is a big no.
For me, vanilla Firefox is not a privacy-focused browser (and neither are Chrome and Edge). For me the criteria is: would I use it to commit a serious crime? If the answer is "no", it is not private. It is not that I want to commit a crime, or that privacy=crime, but that's like a litmus test. In fact I didn't even look into it but TOR browser comes to mind, it is based on Firefox, but of course, telemetry has been removed.
https://petapixel.com/2022/07/27/googles-nest-will-provide-d... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250470
But I also don't believe that personal data Google collect will be used nefariously. I have yet to find a story that proves Google untrustworthy of my data. I consider personalized ads an annoyance (and I block them), but not a significant threat to my privacy, after all, they are shown to no one but me.
Same thing for Windows 10 telemetry.
As you can see, I am rather trusting of big tech, but because I am trusting, I am not going to choose Firefox for privacy reasons. I actually use half Firefox, half Chrome, but privacy has nothing to do with it.
Now, if I was less trusting, enough not to want to share my data with Google and Microsoft, then why would I trust Firefox? I wouldn't want any data to leave my computer unless I explicitly allowed it. Firefox has questionable management and has Google as its biggest partner, enough for the paranoid me to raise concerns. And one thing for sure, with telemetry, if I really had "something to hide" (ex: criminal activity), I wouldn't use Firefox as is.