33
Firefox telemetry unstoppable in PPA?
(poptalk.scrubbles.tech)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
33 points (90.2% liked)
Open Source
31223 readers
259 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is.
Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time it adds unique IDs to every installation: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier/
Another thing they do is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.
Now you're free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I'm sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.
Phoning home isn't necessarily a bad thing (but I agree that it shouldn't do it without express consent) because a lot of app development nowadays is supported by analytics. Crash reports, A/B testing, feature discoverability, etc.
If anything, I generally trust FOSS projects that ask for analytics more than I trust the typical data farm.
the unique id is probably also not meant to be sinister either but that's definitely more of a red flag than phoning home in principle imo
Phoning home in snitching. It is unacceptable as you said unless authorized by the user and should never be configured by default. I really tell people to fire up Wireshark and see what Firefox does, and yes in includes analytics 3rd parties even after a TON of tweaks and stuff disabled.
How can this be even acceptable, whatever they say, they're simply serializing every instance of the app it will eventually get into some crash report, log or 3rd party analytics company...