Arguments like these always reminds me of the story where some town had a population register that included religion, and then the Nazis invaded.
You don't know how or when the collected data will be misused, whether by the original owner, a malicious third-party breaching their systems, or the government (and even somewhat-stable governments can quickly turn sour, see Russia or the US's recent issues on abortion for an example).
Furthermore, at least in Europe, the GDPR mandates that all non-essential data collection must be strictly opt-in, so regardless of opinions, it's a law with which you have to technically comply (even though lacklustre enforcement allows offenders to get away), but doubly so if your entire selling pitch is based on privacy.
Actual URLs are treated very carefully. The only ways I know that they could be leaked: (1) there is limited exposure via the SafeBrowsing stuff, and (2) if you crash then URLs could be swept up in the crash report and visible to privileged people at Mozilla. Or if you manually submit a profile and don't anonymize it (there's a checkbox to submit URLs that is checked by default), but you have to go out of your way to do that. There very well could be other ways, but browsing history is treated as very sensitive data for both legal and moral reasons.
Personally, I would not trust Mozilla to be unable to answer the question "has this IP address ever used Firefox?", especially if under subpoena. The IP is temporarily in the server logs, it's used for coarse location information, etc. I doubt anyone is all that interested in asking that question, though.
>While the fact that the census 1939 inquired Jewish ancestry is a well known fact in historiography its significance for the identification of individual Jews in the context of the Shoah has been disputed. The thesis argues that a population register introduced in 1939 - the People's Card Index (Volkskartei) - was essential in the identification of German Jews. Consulting new sources it shows that the collation of the census data on ancestry with the Volkskartei was ordered in March 1941 to facilitate the identification and localisation of German Jews in the context of the deportations.
The purpose was only so you could be buried where you wanted, in a preferred cemetery, Catholics in a Catholic cemetery for example, people wanted, and cared about that, back then.
But if you died without relatives... the town had to know.
That puts the comments around here saying "what use can they make of X and Y?" on a new light.
I agree that these questions often are asked by those being deceitful, but the reason that works is because it is a dog whistle. Something that hides in normal speech. But we can't presume that someone asking a question like this is in fact dog whistling. If we do, we only enable to whistlers because honest askers will be put off by pretentious and arrogant responses. It is better to answer in good faith until they show their true colors. Even if it is a dog whistle, others will read this public forum and go "why are they attacking someone who is just asking a question?" That gives them power. So let's be honest here.
Respecting users' privacy at a fundamental level is important for a tool that is our most intimate window to the web (a web browser) even if you personally have 'nothing to hide'.
1) They are not misusing collected information in any way
2) They need it so badly that telemetry is ON by default, without the explicit consent of the user
Both of these are simply addressed by having no telemetry by default and all browser telemetry being completely opt-in.
Given that IP address is legally considered private information and Mozilla claims that Firefox is privacy respecting, becoming a zero-telemetry browser by default should be a no-brainer move to substantiate that claim, othwerise it is just empty words that further detoriate the trust in Mozilla.
It should also be noted that every browser with telemetry ON by default (which is almost every mainstream browser) is also directly or indirectly monetized by ad-tech, which does not help their case at all.
Telemetry is a bit like DRM. Firefox strenuously avoided DRM for a long time, losing a lot of market share in the process, until it became clear that it could not stay relevant without being able to display DRM video. The pragmatic decision was either to (1) stay pure, forbid DRM, and disappear; or (2) give in and support DRM, accept that the battle was lost, and continue to survive in order to influence the battles that had not yet been lost.
The same could be said for telemetry, though it has less impact in either direction (it causes less harm, and not having it is less of an existential threat). And we (I work for Mozilla) did resist it for a long time, longer than was probably healthy for the market share, and eventually gave in. At least with telemetry it could be a somewhat principled capitulation—we are much more careful about avoiding tying together different measures that could be correlated to identify users, and we have a strict approval process when adding new telemetry (I've gone through it several times).
Telemetry is sadly necessary to stay competitive in today's landscape. For example, speed is the #1 reason that people report for switching browsers. Relying on either benchmarks or user reports for performance tuning simply isn't good enough. The signal is slow and massively lossy. We need to know what our actual users are experiencing, and whether a change had a positive impact on real-world usage or not. It's easy to come up with a change that improves benchmarks, at least a little. It's much harder to move the needle on what our users are experiencing. Without telemetry, we would make lots of changes that would overfit for benchmark behavior, adding complexity and producing very little benefit.
The other important piece: opt-in telemetry isn't telemetry. The sampling bias results in massive distortion. Being able to say "this change improves performance *for users who have opted in to telemetry*" is mostly useless. Users who opt in are going to have wildly different hardware, on average.
Opt out is much less problematic, even though it also introduces sampling bias, because in practice not that many people bother to opt out. It's definitely reasonable to argue that the opt out mechanisms should be simpler and more clear.
Though at the end of the day, it's much more important that we collect telemetry in a way that does not compromise the privacy of people who don't opt out, and (imho) we're doing pretty well there. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ gives a decent high-level overview. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection gives more of the nitty gritty detail than you'd probably want.
To me, the golden age of tracking is over and the privacy of the user is the new gold standard. It doesn't matter that Firefox needs telemetry to survive (and the empirical evidence of Firefox still losing users left and right does not help that case), if it is going to violate someone's privacy over it.
It also does not matter what its privacy policy is (and they can change), the moment Firefox transferred user's personal information, which is the IP address, without their consent, it took away something private from them, that can potentially be used in the future against them.
Here is an analogy. Would you accept telemetry in your apartment or a house, that is built-in and enabled by default, without your consent? Would you freak out that it exists once you find out?
The builder will then try to explain they use it only to improve homes they make, for example to understand what rooms you use and how, and that without it, they would not survive on the market because their main competitors are using it too. Would you care about that or you would seek to find an apartment elsewhere?
The browser is no different. It is the most intimate tool we use in our daily lives. People are fed of our data being used without our consent.
A privacy respecting browser simply can not allow itself to have telemetry by default. Meaning Firefox simply can not call itself privacy respecting if it is transferring user's private information without their consent, by default - no matter what the economic or business justification are. If a browser is choosing to have telemetry for economic interest, it loses the privilege to call itself privacy-respecting or 'a force for the privacy on the web'. Respecting privacy is digital, it is either 0 or 1, you can't be 0.7 privacy-respecting.
Finally, I don't buy the argument that telemetry is helping FIrefox at all. All that telemetry for the last 10 years or so and Firefox is down to less than 5% market share. It lost 50 million users in the last two years alone.
Perhaps Mozilla should consider becoming more user-centric instead and start listening to the users, instead of using telemetry. Go back to its roots of innovation and experiments, to the golden age of Firefox between 2005-2010 when we got Firebug, Ubiquity, Panorama and go back to product annoncements that excite user about the browser.
You'll have to rely on your phone's OS stalk you by location. ;-)
It's also not necessary to have Mozilla be the bad actor. Anyone who has access to the information in the future is a possible bad actor as they might be able to cross-reference the allegedly "innocuous" information with some future, more-pervasive data.
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- source IP:port
- source OS (through TCP fingerprints)
- destination IP:port
- destination hostname
Now you have to consider where your packets may be diverted and who might want to do what with them.
As the sibling said, the burden of proof is on them. They are the ones who push that on users when there's no technical need.
You ask for a real attack, but you don't seem to accept the example that you were given. I'm not sure what your point is.
What data is being communicated? What about that data is harmful to you? (Genuinely asking for more information, not trying to convince you you're wrong.)