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See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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People really need to kill that notion that telemetry is automatically bad. If the information they are collecting is minimal, as non-identifiable as possible and actually being used to help develop the browser, it's a good thing.
Yes, turbo nerds in the back, specially being opt-out, opt-in telemetry is pretty much useless for trying to understand the majority of your user base.
That must be why Mozilla and Microsoft famously serve the needs of their users so well.
Read what I said again. It is not automatically bad, and it doesn't mean it can't be poorly used or poorly understood by the ones collecting it. It just means that it is an effective way to understand how your users are using your product.
Putting Mozilla (which from what I can tell is doing as much as they can trying to collect this telemetry data in a way that can't be used to identify its users) in the same domain as Microsoft, which collects pretty much everything it can to sell to third party advertisers is ridiculous as best and disingenuous at worst.
They have much in common when it comes to telemetry, in that they both collect quite a lot of it and spend much time and effort to analyze all that data so as to improve the user experience.
I hadn't really considered the advertising angle, but now that you mention it I'm sure advertisers would also find all this thoroughly privacy-respecting anonymized data to be of interest when they're considering the idea of paying for promotion through Firefox Suggest. Mitchell Baker may no longer be in charge of it, but there must still be some highly placed people over there who are fully on board with her vision of turning Firefox into a better advertising platform.