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ISPs Lied To Congress To Spread Confusion About Encrypted DNS, Mozilla Says

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 04 2019, @08:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-dare-anyone-lie-to-congress dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to "publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies."

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

"Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies," Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @10:01PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @10:01PM (#915969)

    The cognitive dissonance at Mozilla is pretty intense. If Mozilla truly cared about user privacy they would not be consistently and actively working against it.

    Here's some things that come to mind, in no particular order (and I've probably missed a lot).

    • By default, Firefox sends every keystroke you type in the address bar to Google.
    • By default, Firefox submits a massive amount of telemetry data to Mozilla, which (according to Mozilla) includes how many times you saw or clicked on the ads which are displayed by default on the about:newtab page. This ad data will (according to Mozilla) be influenced by your locally saved browsing history.
    • By default, Firefox submits all your domain resolution requests to Cloudflare irrespective of system configuration.
    • By default, Firefox encourages usage of third party services to record which websites you visit by literally putting the "Save Link to Pocket" button right between the "Copy link location" and "Save link target" options, almost guaranteeing you will click it by mistake and be encouraged to create an account (unsure if it sends anything if you don't proceed further).
    • By default, Firefox encourages usage of proprietary DRM plugins which do god knows what.

    The list is ever-expanding with almost every new firefox revision. Disabling these behaviours is often nontrivial, typically you need to find some obtusely-named about:config option to set, one at a time. Then if you install a new version of firefox you probably have to go through this all over again because some new "feature" has been added that transmits information to third parties on the internet. And by default, Firefox will overwrite itself with new code provided by Mozilla whenever Mozilla wants it to.

    These are not the actions of an organization that gives a shit about your privacy.

    Lastly, no list like this is complete without mentioning the fact that automatically downloading and executing third party javascript code is pretty much game over for user privacy, but I won't hold that against Mozilla in this case because unfortunately that behaviour is pretty much the definition of a "web browser" at this point.

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  • (Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:33AM

    by zion-fueled (8646) on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:33AM (#916085)

    Yes, which is why you can't use firefox-firefox anymore. This has been true for some time. First I used Cyberfox and now waterfox. Chrome can be handled via the ungoogled version.

    Using the default browsers is crazy and even with your list, firefox is the nice guy.