Mozilla top management did some stupid things in recent years, so your opinion is valid, but OTOH it's a bit sad to me that whatever Mozilla tries to do going forward (or really any software vendor), the top comments are always backlash, bashing of any initiatives, conspiracy theories, and people who want bug-free millions LOC software without any built-in telemetry.

It is very sad, but also a rational response. Mozilla still has a better reputation than most, but the industry overall has been punching people in the face for a long time now.

That people's instinctive response to pretty much anything coming from the big players is mistrust and backlash is entirely understandable. It's the result of learning from experience. On the whole, the industry has burned a significant amount of trust and benefit of the doubt.

Mozilla is now an ad company, like Google.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...

So, yep, my trust has gone to zero. It doesn't seem difficult to not become an ad company, but money corrupts.

That's the part that boggles my mind. Who are these people who rail against telemetry on HN threads?

Are they

1. Gods who simply ship bug free code and can't understand why mortals like us need telemetry to do the same.

2. Non-software people who've never shipped software to devices they don't control, just posting on HN for fun.

Valuing privacy, I can understand, I'm on board with that. It's when they take it to extreme, weird lengths, where they say that telemetry could allow the VSCode team at Microsoft to deanonymise them and then ... what exactly? It's gotten to a point where software like VSCode can't even be discussed on HN without the entire thread just being about telemetry.

> Are they

> 1. Gods who simply ship bug free code and can't understand why mortals like us need telemetry to do the same.

> 2. Non-software people who've never shipped software to devices they don't control, just posting on HN for fun.

I'm a user who thinks internal testing and user bug reports is good enough and doesn't like my computer telling other people how I use it. Doubly so when its software that explicitly bills itself as caring about privacy.

Or, simply, people who do not want their behavior to be monitored regardless of developer rationalization.

Most people would probably be okay with it if it were opt-in and clearly explained what it would be collecting (including letting you see exactly the contents if you'd like), perhaps letting you decide at a granular level what to upload. Upon encountering an error, you could also trigger a dialog to ask if the user would like to upload information (with "yes", "no", "always", and "never" as options).

What people don't like is that lots of modern tech employees apparently don't understand consent, and just assume it's okay to spy on you and take whatever personal data they want.

3. People who want you to respect their boundaries and are trying like hell to drag the Overton window back to an era when surveillance capitalism hadn't savaged privacy norms yet and developers didn't think they were entitled to such data.