hey

run firefox?

hit about:config
search for 'telemetry'

disable aaaaaaaaaallll that shit

@Viss hey, hi, web using normie person here, what is going to happen when I do that and why do I want to do it

genuine question!

@Talen_Lee mozilla has enabled a bunch of telemetry under the hood - meaning that the browser will phone home shit about you, what you do, how often you do it etc - back to their mothership going to about:config in the browser will give you a sorta behind-the-scenes view of all of the browsers configs - including stuff that they dont surface in preferences/settings

like all of this telemetry stuff, which you can gleefully just turn off :D

@Viss oh okay, rad, so this shouldn't make anything I *normally* interface behave any differently?
@Talen_Lee nope! it just turns off all the telemetry that mozilla is using to measure how you use the browser
@Viss hey, thanks! Useful to know, and thanks for a genuinely helpful explanation!
@Viss The true/false I think I have covered, but what about ones with text strings or numbers? Delete them, or OK to ignore them? (For instance, the value stored at toolkit.telemetry.cachedClientID)
@Talen_Lee
@sbourne @Talen_Lee the ones that had telemetry endpoints in there, i edited them and just put garbage in (asdfasdfasdf) so that even if the telemetry gets turned back on, the host its trying to phone home to is busted. i did the same for all the weather crap and llm/ml crap. anywhere theres, like, json config text for llm nonsense or weather nonsense i didnt ask for, i intentionally inserted bad data so it couldnt work even if it 'magically got turned back on'
@Viss @Talen_Lee Aha! I think I'll tackle that tomorrow. I've kinda had my fill of nonsense today, if you know what I mean. And, thank you!
@sbourne @Viss @Talen_Lee I just cross checked Firefox vs. Waterfox, and Waterfox was basically disabled (I think fully, not sure on one setting). Best bet for normies is to load Waterfox instead.