Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Most of the telemetry can be disabled in the Firefox settings. Some of the web services depend on some Mozilla domains so blocking all Mozilla domains will probably break a few things here and there?
Other than that, with the current situation, I would already think to switch to a Firefox fork or other alternative.
Firefox is walking a very dark path right now and you can see/feel how they are slowly rolling the enshitification path :/
Firefox automatically updates to install new privacy-abusing features like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112. So getting all the settings right once isn’t enough—you need to be constantly vigilant.
Like you said, a fork is a much better option, since they take care of stripping out the user-hostile nonsense for you. I like Librewolf.
Hmm, this telemetry can just be disabled, can’t it?
The question is, can you trust Mozilla to respect those settings, to not change them, and to not remove them? Judging by the events of the last week, I certainly wouldn't. I would prefer a solution that is entirely out of Mozilla's control.
What? What?
Their track record has no instance of them not respecting settings! A track record of multiple decades! The code is fully auditable, so any of those shenanigans would be caught immediately!
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills lately.
We need to be on guard and verify they don't do this shit, but outright expecting it? When Firefox also has a history of absolutely abysmal PR on shit like this, without the follow up of abysmal practices?
It feels like accelerationism. Like people want Firefox to fail, rather than just wanting to be prepared if it does.
Check the wording. I said Mozilla, not Firefox.
I think Firefox is a great product and want it to succeed, but lately Mozilla has been burning its reputation by chasing the advertising and AI trends. Make no mistake, they are a for-profit company. That doesn't mean their products should be shunned, but they shouldn't be exempt from skepticism and rational distrust simply for being the lesser evil.
My apologies, with the collective chicken little-ing around Firefox I didn't read as clearly as I should have.
Yeah, control should be on the user's end rather than expecting a website or external resource to not change.
AI trends
Yeah that part kinda sucks, but it's not all bad. For example, there's the offline translation engine that relies on a trained model that runs entirely locally, which is kinda neat and great privacy-wise.
Edit: As rtxn and n0x0n point out, we can adjust settings in Firefox itself and expect them to stay applied, but any settings done within the websites for Mozilla's services could be changed on the Mozilla end at any time. Probably best to have an extra layer to this just in case.
Yes. Yes it can, and you bet your bibby people will be watching to see if Mozilla bypassed those settings, not that they ever have in their multiple decades of existence.
You'll also have to opt out of using Mozilla services like browsing and bookmark sync.
I think you mostly just need to block incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org
Well, thats today that is. What about tomorrow?
You're asking if someone can give you the names of any telemetry endpoints that may exist in the future?
If you're that worried about it and suspect Mozilla will act maliciously then you should probably use a different browser/fork. Since pihole blocking depends on the browser respecting your system DNS.
If they were trying to be malicious they could resolve DNS through a custom module over an encrypted connection. Pihole doesn't block DNS, it simply filters the DNS queries issued by your system. Malicious apps can still resolve DNS queries without using your system's DNS which will completely bypass pihole.
Fire up the browser and watch the DNS logs, you'll need to still allow update checks most likely.
Unless the updates are done from your distro's repos
Windows users are still living in the wild west where every application can just download and install files arbitrarily.
Yeah. Can't imagine I used to see not having a unified method to update everything as normal...