snitching to Mozilla every single time you launch the browser
It’s only for the first run, to track downloads and installations. Pretty much every mobile app on both Android and iOS, and a lot of desktop apps, do the same thing as they want to know how many people install (and uninstall) their app.
It’s also only if you download the installer from the Firefox site, so Linux repos are unaffected.
All I was saying was that the unique download ID is only used once, not every time you start Firefox. I wasn’t making any other claims as to what other analytics they use.
Having said that, Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them (to fix bugs), which features people are using the most and least (to know what to work on and what to potentially deprecate), etc. As long as it’s anonymous, I don’t see a problem in that?
Sure, but a lot of systems don’t actually store it. Even if they do, erasing the last octet (for IPv4) or the last 32 bits (for IPv6) is sufficient to de-identify it.
OK, but what do you expect companies to do about this? There’s literally no way to browse the web without revealing your IP address. Are you saying that every single company online is collecting PII?
Even just checking for updates (which happens in the background with all modern software) would connect to Mozilla’s servers.
No amount of in-house testing is going to catch everything that can be experienced on a nearly-infinite amount of hardware/software configurations that are tested once a large userbase gets a hold of a product.
I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.
I’d also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.
I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I’d still say it’s probably a bad comparison given my second point.
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It’s only for the first run, to track downloads and installations. Pretty much every mobile app on both Android and iOS, and a lot of desktop apps, do the same thing as they want to know how many people install (and uninstall) their app.
It’s also only if you download the installer from the Firefox site, so Linux repos are unaffected.
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All I was saying was that the unique download ID is only used once, not every time you start Firefox. I wasn’t making any other claims as to what other analytics they use.
Having said that, Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them (to fix bugs), which features people are using the most and least (to know what to work on and what to potentially deprecate), etc. As long as it’s anonymous, I don’t see a problem in that?
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Sure, but a lot of systems don’t actually store it. Even if they do, erasing the last octet (for IPv4) or the last 32 bits (for IPv6) is sufficient to de-identify it.
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OK, but what do you expect companies to do about this? There’s literally no way to browse the web without revealing your IP address. Are you saying that every single company online is collecting PII?
Even just checking for updates (which happens in the background with all modern software) would connect to Mozilla’s servers.
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No amount of in-house testing is going to catch everything that can be experienced on a nearly-infinite amount of hardware/software configurations that are tested once a large userbase gets a hold of a product.
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I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.
I’d also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.
I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I’d still say it’s probably a bad comparison given my second point.
Yeah, embedded systems for military applications is exactly the same as consumer software. You’re right.
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tell me you’re not a decent software developer without telling me you’re not a decent software developer