Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by seqizz on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:01PM
(#33709640)
I think what they meant is to configure proxying all possible telemetry via this service, and enforce anonymisation. Sounds good imho. I'm trying to disable telemetry but it's always a losing game, each version adds something new to each app.
Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by jlarocco on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @06:20PM
(#33712943)
I don't think that changes my answer.
The telemetry proxy service would need packages for each distro, including scripts to work with systemd and init, and maybe a "libtelemetry" package to make using the service easier.
The way I see it working is that if the system service isn't installed, isn't running, or has remote telemetry turned off then the commands for sending telemetry will succeed but send the data to /dev/null. Otherwise the data gets anonymized and uploaded to the user's configured telemetry host.
It could almost be built on syslog, now that I think about it more, but that would be terrible.
There's nothing stopping a person from creating that. You'd package it up and get it added to the Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, etc. repos and people would be able to install and use it. That's about as close as you'll get to having it generally available for all Linux distros.
Personally I don't see the value, and think it's invasive, so I would never install it, but people who wanted it would be able to use it.