this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Is it just me or is this video stupid af? You can easily disable all of the telemetry in Firefox. Like yea, no shit if you keep recommendations on, it'll collect data for that. How else would it recomend shit to you? Am i missing something here?
Hysteria drives clicks.
I was hopeful that there would be less of these shitposts. I expect this bullshit on Reddit but I had higher hopes for Lemmy. I guess I'm naive.
I mean, yeah, what did you expect? People make shitposts, no matter what the name of the website is
I just assumed there would be LESS shitposts, lol. But clearly that was wrong.
Enrage to Engage with a side order of Cunningham's Law. Whether or not the content has merit, you'll hook a bunch of folks eager to argue about it in the comments and get a hit of that sweet sweet engagement.
Also, Mozilla is non-profit. They run on fumes because of it. As long as everything is disable-able, and it is, I'm happy to let them make some money so they can keep going. We need Firefox.
It's infuriating that this video calls out Mozilla's declaration that they respect user privacy, as if this contradicts that.
Respect is giving users options to do whatever they like and respecting their choices. Firefox does all of that. It respects you as the user and trusts you to control your own privacy by providing you the tools to do so.
Modern day software design emphasizes removing user choices so they're easier to corral. Firefox will straight up let you break it if you want. It lets spinoffs like Fennec exist. That is user respect.
Yea. We really do need them. Like no browser is gonna make you 100% (or close to 100%) anonymous unless you use TOR (correctly). Even then idk. TOR is above my knowledge-base so I stick with firefox. It's really the best you're gonna get for reasonable privacy control. Of course I hardened it a bit and added a few extensions.
My favourite part is.... the context the data is collected. Its collected during you search or interact with firefox addons or Firefox sync.
In the settings you can disable telemetry. It's very self explanatory. Also I think firefox may call home to check if you have telemetry enabled (y/n). But that isn't a big deal. Can you be more specific on what actual data you see Firefox still sending home and exactly what the problem is? Saying that firefox still phones home isn't helpful or a big deal in itself, without providing the actual data sent that you disagree with.
You would have to use wireshark or some other software to look at the actual data being sent. I'm not 100% sure. Likely the first one is just checking to see if you have telemetry enabled or something. Like I said, you can't just assume all of your data is being sent because it's phoning Firefox domains. You need to pick apart the traffic. It could literally just be sending (user has telemetry disabled) and that's it. You don't know. Firefox is open source. If it was sending massive amounts of user info despite telemetry heing turned off then it would be fucking obvious and you'd hear about it everywhere. You could try posting in a firefox community and asking if anyone knows. I'd be interested too
Can you send me the link where people were trying to figure those 2 out?
EDIT: Nvm I found what these are. Check my other comment.
Sorry for linking to a Reddit thread, but looks like at least the first domain you listed is for checking blocklists and extensions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/fwc2sf/shavarservicesmozilla_and/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Admin
None of these seem suspicious or privacy-invasive. Like I said, the browser is doing a bunch of shit in the background. You have to actually look at the traffic being sent.
Believe me, i'm the same way. If I see an app sending out domain requests, I get automatically sketched out. But if you take a step back, and really try to research what these domains are for, you'll see that most (not all of them) are just normal data that you need for the software to function.
https://pi-hole.net/ whatever site you want from everything on your network.
ublock origin can be set to do so as well for browser that isn't a chromium reskin.
But be aware blocking traffic to a site doesn't care about "but the update I wanted" and such.