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57% Positive

Analyzed from 572 words in the discussion.

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#telemetry#software#don#off#firefox#browser#free#opt#disable#user

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jasonvorhe•about 3 hours ago
> To be clear, I know that the AI kill switch does not claim to disable telemetry or advertising.

Well, at least it's not the closing sentence.

mossTechnician•about 1 hour ago
The troubling part in the post is that telemetry (about AI features) begins before the user can rush to disable either of them.

It's a response to the Mozilla CEO saying[0] "Trust is earned. Consent is asked. AI skipped both," which promised to ameliorate this issue, and apparently did not.

[0]: https://aed.me/articles/turn-it-off/

Farmadupe•about 3 hours ago
Thankyou! that title was painful, I spent 20 seconds term rewriting it in my head..

* Firefox's AI Switch Is Off. Telemetry Isn't

* Firefox's AI Switch Is Off. Telemetry Isn't off [complete second clause]

* Firefox's Telemetry Isn't Off [remove negative clause]

* Firefox's Telemetry Is On [remove double negative]

----

Admittedly I didn't read past the first two paragraphs, but I assume it is a several hundred word repetition of its tautologous title.

userbinator•about 3 hours ago
It's somewhat cathartic to go through the settings and JS parts, using the source as a guide, and rip out/disable all the spyware, which you can do even without having to build the whole thing from source.

Since I do my content filtering at the proxy level, all I want is just a browser .

anonymous344•about 2 hours ago
how? i used pihole, but it slows down everything
overflowy•about 2 hours ago
I love Firefox but I don't understand why anybody would use it without a custom config like BetterFox[1].

[1] https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox

bsian•about 1 hour ago
Because my browser is an extremely sensitive piece of software and I don’t trust just anybody to provide it for me.
overflowy•about 1 hour ago
That's literally just a configuration file. You can adapt it to your needs and create something even more tailored than the browser's default version.
jqpabc123•about 3 hours ago
Just follow the money.
jamesjhare•about 3 hours ago
water is wet

the sky is blue

drnick1•about 3 hours ago
There shouldn't be any telemetry in free software, end of. There are other ways to estimate the number of active users, e.g. through downloads and browser fingerprints.

Mozilla does not need more money than it already has. Ladybird has shown that you don't need a huge team to build a browser from scratch, so clearly Mozilla isn't spending all the money it gets from Google for development.

demibabs•about 3 hours ago
I don’t get this take. There’s good reasons to have telemetry in any software. Doesn’t really have to do with whether it’s free or not.

Of course, it’s also good to have the option to disable it.

ginko•about 3 hours ago
Telemetry should be opt-in.
zamadatix•about 1 hour ago
This is like saying you shouldn't have a computer because you can do addition yourself. Okay, what about all of the other use cases? Besides, collecting stats based on downloads/updates/etc is still telemetry.

I'm perfectly fine with telemetry in any software, free or paid. Just make it opt-in and don't turn into cookie notice style malicious compliance about that.

nickthegreek•about 2 hours ago
> There shouldn't be any telemetry in free software, end of.

Don't install it if you dont want it, that is where you choice lies. Telemetry inclusion is up to the author. Good ones will make it opt-in if it is truly necessary to include.

> Ladybird has shown that you don't need a huge team to build a browser from scratch

Ladybird has done no such thing.

sourthyme•about 3 hours ago
Does Firefox sell this data? That would be bad and should be able to turn off. But there's other uses for telemetry that can help free software.
JohnFen•about 2 hours ago
Like with any software, you can't ever really be sure if they share this data with other entities. That's part of why I don't let software phone home, FOSS or not.
throwa356262•about 2 hours ago
Why gather this much data if you are not monetizeing it?

It has a cost and can also become a liability. You don't do it just for fun.

kibwen•about 3 hours ago
> There are other ways to estimate the number of active users

The point of telemetry is not to estimate the number of active users, and focusing on "telemetry" is the wrong bogeyman. Things like crash reports are telemetry, and are perfectly acceptable as long as the user remains in control over whether or not to send them. Software should respect user privacy and user control.

wtallis•31 minutes ago
At some point, the pervasive unethical behavior of having telemetry on by default instead of opt-in, not just in proprietary software but also in open-source software and even from Mozilla itself becomes overwhelming enough that "telemetry=bad" becomes a reasonable summary of the situation. We need a new word specifically for ethical opt-in data collection.