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, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 25 2017, @04:52AM (1 child)
You must be the only other person other than Kathleen who's ever seen Rob Malda's micropenis.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 25 2017, @04:33PM
I'm only hypothesizing here. Based on the way the guy talks, my hypothesis is that *if* there is indeed one to be seen, the STM is our best bet to detect it. For science! Also lulz, but mostly science.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...