Neowin has a brief warning that Mozilla plans to collect anonymized user data. The given reason is to better understand how people use Firefox. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this plan is that it is opt-out rather than opt-in. This is very far from the early days of Firefox when it had previously touted privacy as one of its main advantages.
As stated in the Google Groups announcement thread, they intend to use RAPPOR:
RAPPOR is a novel privacy technology that allows inferring statistics about populations while preserving the privacy of individual users.
This repository contains simulation and analysis code in Python and R.
[...] Publications
- RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response
- Building a RAPPOR with the Unknown: Privacy-Preserving Learning of Associations and Data Dictionaries
Links
[Update @ 20170824_152224 UTC: fixed bad link to Google Groups thread.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)
I thought the Firefox "Health Report" was enabled by default anyway, or is that something specific to my distro?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @04:01PM
Yes, Firefox has been bad for privacy by default for a long time (at least since version 3, when they introduced the address bar that sends what you type in it to a third party search provider).
There is a long list of about:config options you need to adjust in order to disable Firefox from sending information to third parties beyond what's normally required to use the web.