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Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Importantly, if you have already opted out of sending data to Mozilla, this change will not affect you. It only sends data if you have the setting turned on. It takes just a few clicks to entirely disable it, and Mozilla deletes all record of your browser within 30 days from turning off this feature. If you're worried about it, do it now, it's just under Settings > Privacy & Security. Instructions are also linked in the blog post.
I'm not a fan of the telemetry being enabled by default but having the option to completely disable it makes it not that bad. Though Mozilla definitely doesn't need search history data (unless the law enforcements told them to collect it) so this change is kinda sus
It seems like a profit-driven thing to me. Big piles of anonymized data are worth a pretty penny.
Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned subsidiary that is Mozilla Corporation that is for-profit.
For instance the revenue from Google, so they’re the default search engine, is seen by Mozilla Corporation. So things search-related will indeed be part of their for-profit arm.
It's technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.
Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that's independent of for-/non-profit status.
It’s not a loophole. As a subsidiary, profits are still invested into the nonprofit and they’re still guided by the Mozilla manifesto. It just lets them do more and raise more funds which would be difficult to do with nonprofit status (selling default search engine for instance). Here’s their original press release when they incorporated Mozilla Corporation in 2005.
A non-profit can, in fact, profit, but it has specific rules on what it can do with those profits. Tax law is a rabbit hole and I don't even wanna peer in
Used to work for a non-profit retirement community in a pretty small area; the guy running the joint lived in a $3M "house" with a full 7 car garage.
Enshitification hits every company, even Mozilla.
Unfortunately Mozilla is being run by a McKinsey consultant.
From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.
Then what's the point in collecting such data? It won't help to fix bugs, add new features or even make useful statistics to show publicly. Only personalized ads is what comes to mind. Yes it seems to be anonymized well enough but still ad companies love such data. Maybe Mozilla wants to implement a custom ads functionality that uses this data or they just want to sell it idk. Still changes in this direction are kinda sus
I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for
weatherthere, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you're actually searching for.
First thing I do on every Firefox installation on every device. 3 clicks and most of this nonsense stops.
I'd appreciate Mozilla not doing something like that in the first place, maybe don't try to build products and focus on the browser. 🤷♂️
I’d just like for these things to be opt-in, not opt-out.