There are two claims in there, as freedom (in the software sense) and privacy
are to important but separate issues. I agree that Firefox does not
adequately respect privacy, but it is free software which is why it is
possible to create Firefox derivatives that improve the software with respect
to privacy.
Well said. heyjoe raises interesting privacy concerns. It is unfortunate he
pretends they are freedom issues. They are not. That makes his arguments
look bad, including on Mozilla's bug tracker:
It is a shame that generally a useful technical investigation is made all but
useless by waving "freedom 0" around here. Your freedom is about the user
using the program in any way you like - not having the program or the vendor
DO exactly what YOU what. Hence the other freedoms to achieve that.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424781#c16
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/imperfection-isnt-oppression.html starts with:
When a free program lacks capabilities that users want, that is unfortunate;
we urge people to add what is missing. Some would go further and claim that a
program is not even free software if it lacks certain functionality — that
it denies freedom 0 (the freedom to run the program as you wish) to users or
uses that it does not support. This argument is misguided because it is based
on identifying capacity with freedom, and imperfection with oppression.
The issues heyjoe raises are not lacks of capabilities but undesired
capabilities or, to be more precise, capabilities whose side effects
(potential spying) makes them undesirable. Yet, the same rationale applies.
Ubuntu's spyware was a similar issue (although worse imho: even the main goal
of the capability was not laudable) as those heyjoe points. The conclusion
of https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware is not that freedom 0 is
tainted. Not at all. It is:
What's at stake is whether our community can effectively use the argument
based on proprietary spyware. If we can only say, “free software won't spy
on you, unless it's Ubuntu,” that's much less powerful than saying, “free
software won't spy on you.”
Another problem, that
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424781#c14 clearly states, is
that Firefox/Chromium's bug tracker is not the place where policies are
discussed. They are places for specific technical issues. And heyjoe does
not seem to understand even simple technical explanations (e.g., that the
check box "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"
switches datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled and that, once "false", all
"telemetry" configs become moot: no telemetry is sent).
Finally, I do not understand heyjoe's conclusion, in this thread:
Mozilla seems not to care at all. Chromium developers replied much more
sanely and as a whole Chromium so far seems the most privacy respecting
browser
On Mozilla's side he got an invitation to argue for policy changes in
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance and several statements like:
No user should ever have to go into about:config to do anything as important
as preserve their privacy. We take user control and user privacy too
seriously to hide it away. It's the reason we have such rigorous review on
the data we _do_ ask to collect, and the reason we only collect anonymous
usage statistics
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424781#c4
On Chromium's side:
I guess your feature request boils down to "Create a setup in Chrome such
that not network communication happens in the background." I acknowledge this
feature request but don't think that it is very likely to become a priority
soon.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=795526#c2
