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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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Technology
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There are definitely 2 kinds of people commenting this post. The first one who supports telemetry (and Big Tech) and another one that supports freedom and opt-in. This is interesting to see on something like Lemmy. I think the ones who support telemetry are devs and it is a little bit concerning to me
I am a dev and I do not support telemetry
Same. If It’s to exist at all, it should be opt-in and explicit about what it’s doing.
This isn't even telemetry, it's data collection for AI. That they refused to say that let's you know that they think what they're doing needs to be obfuscated.
If they refused to say it how do you know its the case? Also how would the data described in the article be useful to an ai, genuine question.
In life, people will frequently say things to you that won't be the whole truth, but you can figure out what's actually going on by looking at the context of the situation. This is commonly referred to as "being deceptive" or sometimes just "lying". Corporate PR and salespeople, the ones who put out this press release, do it regularly.
You don't need to record content categories of searches to make a good tool for displaying websites, you need it to perform predictions about what users will search for. They've already said they wanted to focus on AI and linked to an example of the system they want to improve, it's their site recommender, complete with sponsored recommendations that could be sold for a higher price if the Mozilla AI could predict that "people in country X will soon be looking for vacations".
I support anonymous telemetry collected by a small non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.