this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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All I was saying was that the unique download ID is only used once, not every time you start Firefox. I wasn't making any other claims as to what other analytics they use.
Having said that, Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them (to fix bugs), which features people are using the most and least (to know what to work on and what to potentially deprecate), etc. As long as it's anonymous, I don't see a problem in that?
Sure, but a lot of systems don't actually store it. Even if they do, erasing the last octet (for IPv4) or the last 32 bits (for IPv6) is sufficient to de-identify it.
You can't guarantee it is isn't stored somewhere or checked by someone between you and Mozilla and used against you. Even your ISP can use Mozilla's calling home against you.
OK, but what do you expect companies to do about this? There's literally no way to browse the web without revealing your IP address. Are you saying that every single company online is collecting PII?
Even just checking for updates (which happens in the background with all modern software) would connect to Mozilla's servers.
I except things to be kept on a reasonable level and that doesn't include the amount of connections Firefox does, nor contacting a 3rd party analytics company.
What I also expect is to have simple toggles instead of having to spend half an hour going over advanced config, disable everything that can be disabled and still having it making connections to 3rd parties. Is it that hard to be transparent and make things right?
Telemetry is the new age bullshit excuse and alternative to proper in-house software testing and money cuts. Why hire testers and have public testing programs if you can just deploy to the end users, let it break and then collect logs. You'll get tons of PII as a bonus :)
No amount of in-house testing is going to catch everything that can be experienced on a nearly-infinite amount of hardware/software configurations that are tested once a large userbase gets a hold of a product.
Yeah I guess NASA, Lockheed Martin and Airbus all use analytics for testing instead of actual testing. You seem to be very unware of the current corporate trend of replacing in-house testing by analytics as a cost cutting strategy.
I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.
I'd also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.
I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I'd still say it's probably a bad comparison given my second point.
Yeah, embedded systems for military applications is exactly the same as consumer software. You're right.
Have you ever noticed that when stuff was sold on CDs and internet updates weren't a thing software was properly tested and mostly bug free while today the end user has to be the beta tester and report bugs / have telemetry?
Software should be approached as engineering not as the shit show it is today.
tell me you're not a decent software developer without telling me you're not a decent software developer