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: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Friday August 25 2017, @03:14AM (1 child)
It's OK, Mozilla has been ignoring its users for years, so gathering data that they can ignore as well won't make any difference.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @07:50AM
Fun thing with statistics is that it can be interpreted.
Developers: "We created this cool new way of doing the same thing, but people are still using the old way, so the new way must be made more prominent and the old way must be hidden in about:config or removed".
Users: The new way is terrible and doesn't do what we want.
Of course we agree that Mozilla doesn't want to listen to users, but collecting statistics allows them to do just that: Not listen to users.