More than Google or Microsoft does not say much. And - judging by how hard it is to fully disable telemetry and call-home on, say, Mozilla Thunderbird:
https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798
I wouldn't trust them very much.
(Yes, I know it's a different project and not the same team but Mozilla is still the parent entity etc. etc.)
But that link, and the comments at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/thunderbird-should-by-d... ('Given that significant parts of Thunderbirds user interface (addons manager details, welcome page, whats new on updates etc) are essentially served as web pages into Thunderbird, perhaps your expectations are becoming unreasonable.') tell me that Thunderbird does not respect my desire to minimize my info leakage to the outside world.
The overall attitude included comments like 'I would like to see significantly more anonymous telemetry not less', while I want no network connections in my mail reader except that which I specifically initiate.
These are people so acculturated to data collection that they don't understand that some others don't want it.
A couple of years back I was involved in an argument about doing something a bit similar in LibreOffice:
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2022/11/01/commun...
Note the back-and-forth in the comments.
OTOH, why can't get get UI feedback from logging institutional users for different domains, where they can get real legal and ethical consent from the institution side?
I mean, yes, it's easier to force it on everyone and have them swallow the pill for lack of alternatives than it is to deal with organizations. But then the issue isn't one of lack of data, it's that they don't want to deal with organizations as equals, since that takes more work.
And honestly, whenever I see that something has been anonymized I assume it isn't. Mostly because the industry has a terrible track record, secondly because the incentives are almost always misaligned to begin with.
I'd trust mozilla more than most, but not enough to give them free rein and opt in things for me. I don't (yet) know enough specifics on this matter to make an informed decision, but if it weren't for hn I'd have missed this.
I doubt firefox would ask the user after install (again, incentives).
I should go through all options for every update (not just for firefox). But I can't, I don't have enough time. I need to be able to put some trust into the software I use, and things like this erode that trust.