Mozilla Has Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This included data about advertising within Firefox’s New Tab page, along with a lot of other technical information abou...
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This data was then shared with advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
Mozilla Has Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This included data about advertising within Firefox’s New Tab page, along with a lot of other technical information abou...
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This data was then shared with advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
Mozilla Has Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This included data about advertising within Firefox’s New Tab page, along with a lot of other technical information abou...
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This data was then shared with advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
Last week, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and things did not go well.
I actually hadn't checked the documentation (serves me right, of course), but I can't see where they are up front about it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-tab#w_data-and-privacy https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
When you view or click on a sponsored shortcut, Firefox sends anonymized technical data to our partner through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The code for this proxy service is available on GitHub for interested technical audiences. This data does not include any personally identifying information and is only shared when you click on a sponsored shortcut.
By default, when stories are recommended on your New Tab page, Firefox collects data on how often they appear and how many times they are clicked. This data is not linked to any technical or interaction information about you or your Firefox browser. You can learn more about the data we collect and opt out data collection if you prefer.
If you choose topics of interest to personalize your recommendations, the selected topics will be collected to improve the relevance of the recommended articles and sponsored content on your New Tab page. This information is also not associated with any technical or interaction data about you or your Firefox browser.
Do you see any reference here what we see today on the new Mozilla Privacy Notice that says that you can opt out of tracking for ads by disabling the "technical and interaction" data checkbox?
Mozilla’s legal updates from last week are the gift that keep on giving. Take a look at the table below (extracted from the Firefox Privacy Notice):
Well, to be clear it is ideas about "the Services", per the clause. Are you saying the clause says something it doesn't?
On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
Growing Mozilla — and evolving our leadership
Since 2022, Mozilla has been in an active process evolving what we do – and renewing our leadership. Today we announced several updates on the leader
Contributor spotlight – Mayank Bansal
In the open source world, there’s a saying that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” At Bugzilla, we’ve taken this principle to heart with our belief that “bugs are ...
Introducing the Chrome Extension for the Firefox Profiler
What is the Firefox Profiler? The Firefox Profiler is a performance analysis tool designed to help developers understand and optimize the performance of websites and Firefox itself. It allows you ...
Not true, Firefox never overtook Internet Explorer.
This is fine and all if you have some low-end device without gapps, but... run Firefox Nightly. 😉
Google Chrome may be a mainstay on Android smartphones, but thanks to its flaws, it's not my default browser and never will be.
They likely need a monetization model in order to pay developers.
And then later I learned it was a cooperative effort, just not under the same name
Source?
They developed the "privacy sandbox" together.
Yeah that's not true.
The (pre)history of Mozilla’s localization repository infrastructure
You have to remember that sometimes when that shiny new CSS feature comes out, it is underspecced, with unhandled corner cases -- "just do what Chromium does" is not a standard -- or is it? Having multiple implementations of a spec prove that it is interoperable - without that, you might have a good spec, or you might have a spec that says "whatever Chrome does is what is expected". Not sure that is what we want from new CSS (or any) features.
The 2FA thing sounds like it's all on the Dropbox side if you are just entering a code you got from an authenticator app. The Google login issue may be a real issue -- did the Google login specifically work on another browser?
There is nothing about MV3 that stops you from improving things.
What about this stuff?
Uhh, that doesn't seem normal at all. Is this a default config? Any extensions in use?
Probably simpler to just "Forget" the site from the site's context menu in the history sidebar.
What are you a captcha?
"Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it's harder for users to investigate", which is clearly an inaccurate statement.
Why is it an inaccurate statement?
What user are you thinking of?
You really felt misled that it was harder to inspect? What makes you think I have the expertise to inspect this? I'm not even a user and I wouldn't know where to start to find the ad blocker within that tarball. Would you?
In any case, I clarified why it was harder to inspect - to me it felt obvious that being closed source made it harder to investigate. The fact that it is also shared source really has no bearing to the general observation, especially since we're talking about a 2GB tarball where I don't even know where to start. And I'm a pretty technical person.
How would a user easily investigate this vs. an open source browser?
It is, it is just source available. Still closed source.
You're awesome!
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users B...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
YSK: Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users B...
Google is weakening ad blockers as part of their MV3 extension standard and this will trickle down into all Chromium browsers. Built in ad blockers lack features compared to uBlock Origin as well.
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users B...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users B...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users B...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and i
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
