Tom RitterMar 5

I've been seeing a lot of comments online about how browser telemetry is just a way to spy on users and we never actually use it, and it provides no value.

We can debate whether you think someone (Firefox or otherwise) overcollects telemetry, or doesn't collect it in a privacy-preserving enough way. And you should be able to turn it all off, for any reason.

But it's been instrumental for me, personally, to ship multiple security improvements to Firefox - and I'm just one of hundreds of developers. I wrote up some more here: https://ritter.vg/blog-telemetry.html

telemetry helps. you still get to turn it off - ritter.vg

Tom Ritter's personal homepage, where he rambles about tech-related topics.

Show threadPaulMar 5
@tomrittervg I admit that I am biased in respect of Mozilla software, but across all different open source platforms I use, I recognise that providing anonymous usage data that helps improve the product and drive any project fotwards is a small effort considering how little I have paid for the software to start with.
Show threadWladimir PalantMar 5
@plwt @tomrittervg While I don’t really disagree: it’s pseudonymous, not anonymous. Mozilla chose to implement the former, not the latter, and it’s a very significant difference. I’ve hated this ever since I found out a decade ago.
Show threadPaul
@WPalant @tomrittervg (Do not quite know the difference, had a challenging and unpleasantly serious day and those are very long words.)
Mar 5 at 10:00pmWeb
Show threadWladimir PalantMar 5

@plwt The difference: anonymous data has no identity attached to it. Pseudonymous data has an identity attached, it merely doesn’t map to a real name (at least not without effort). Mozilla telemetry has been using random user identifiers, probably since its very inception, so it’s possible to isolate all data coming from the same source. Which has certainly some advantages for the developers, but it’s also a significant privacy risk. With the amount of data collected by telemetry, it has to be assumed that user’s identity can be reconstructed for a significant number of users – if somebody were to take interest in that data.

@tomrittervg