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 Friday August 25 2017, @07:42AM
Problem is, if you ask, you get an answer.
Such as "I like the old way of doing this, and I'd rather use Chrome than the new way".
Where as with statistics, you can just see that people still use the old way, and so it becomes "the new way of doing this must be more prominent, and the old way must be hidden better or removed".
As we have seen lately, the Mozilla people really loves the second version.