this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Unfortunately the way the real world works, companies use this information to figure out where to put more money developing features, fixing bugs, etc.
I work at a fintech company, and when you use our software, we get information about your device such as OS Version, GPU (incl driver version) , CPU, network driver, amount of RAM and various network statistics. We aren't selling this data to other parties we just collect it for use ub troubleshooting your issue and in determining how much effort to put toward certain things. Our app works in Linux but we don't officially support it, this is backed by the fact that the user population is in a fraction of a percent compared to Windows and Mac users ๐คทโโ๏ธ I wish we would fix the Linux app to be up to par with the other two, but it doesn't make sense based on the data we have.
That kind of information is useful in all sorts of decision making that isn't necessarily what you commonly think of as "they're using/selling my data!"
Do you understand how your anecdote is irrelevant?
It is right and good for open source projects to have very different structure and motivation than for-profit corporations. The failure of the organization that makes Firefox to be different in that way is part of the problem here!
Most of what I said applies to organizations developing software, it doesn't matter if it's open source or not. Firefox isn't some hobbyist project on github.