Comment by marginalia_nu
4 years ago
This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
This also wouldn't be so bad if people were capable of nuance instead of acting as if everything involving data were the same thing. I won't claim Mozilla is in any way perfect, but even as someone who is very much pro-privacy it is a little bit ridiculous how much people loose their shit about tiny things like this and claim there is no difference to what other trackers do.
If you position your product as being about privacy, your company about being about privacy, and talk about the importance of online privacy whenever you get any sort of opportunity, then it looks extremely bad if you can't refrain from spying on your users. I don't really think there is any way around this fact.
If this type of telemetry is necessary for Mozilla to develop software, then perhaps they shouldn't be talking so much about privacy, because as it stands, they're not walking the talk, that's what ultimately looks bad. The telemetry is incidental. Nobody is railing against Microsoft for doing the same thing because they're not constantly seen preaching about how bad it is.
do you seriously consider counting how many installs are triggered from a download "spying"? Privacy is a bit more complicated than that IMHO.
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