In any case, technically it is possible to get information without loosing
privacy. Example: you turn on the radio and you listen to music.
For Safe Browsing that would mean continuously broadcasting to to all online
systems hundreds of thousands of unsafe URLs:
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7381518/#size-of-blacklist
*That* (not adding noise) would be extremely inefficient. And why stopping
there? By your logic, every website should continuously broadcast whatever
they host to all online systems!
Freedom means no limitations.
No it does not. You are not less free because you cannot fly, for instance.
Freedom means "exemption from *external* control, interference, regulation,
etc." (emphasis is mine): www.dictionary.com/browse/freedom
As I wrote: being in control of your *own* life.
Same here.
So you agree that the enhanced security your parents get is worth the privacy
they give up? Don't you think most users are like your parents and less like
you?
The first thing that comes to mind - torrents, mirrors (like we have for
FOSS). There are other means too perhaps. Example: encouraging ISPs to keep a
local mirror on the gateways, proxies. It is possible.
Distributing the lists is not the hard part. Creating them is. It involves
crawling the Web and processing every page (Google does so in parallel
virtual machines):
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/provos/provos.pdf
The problem is that trust implies faith which is not facts.
Trusting nobody, not even free software communities, and not being a
programmer, you should stop using software. All of it.
Google's servers are not less proprietary.
Google's server (the software they run on their side) is trivially free:
there is one single user and it has all four freedoms. On the contrary,
Windows is distributed to many users that do not have the control they
deserve on it. Maybe you wanted to write "Google's services" but services
cannot be said free/proprietary:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-nonfree.html
I would be happy to see that sending my IP address periodically with "noise"
to Mozilla, Amazon or whoever is worth it.
You apparently think it is worth it on your parents' computer.
which means that nobody (except Mozilla) really knows what is going on (even
they needed time to check). So excercising the freedom 1 is a next to
impossible effort which obviously nobody would waste time on.
That is not correct.
Telemetry means remote measuring. Measuring means getting the value of a
physical quantity and comparing it to a standard value.
You file a bug in the "telemetry" component of Firefox. Whether you like it
or not, "telemetry" means something precise in this context: it is the
component that collects usage information and sent it to Mozilla, the source
code in toolkit/components/telemetry/. To argue for general policy changes,
you were invited to write to https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
They give new meaning to the words and argue over them just for the sake of
argumentation.
How should Firefox's telemetry component be called?
Which implies that there are levels of privacy respect.
Of course there is. You may agree to show your ID to take a plane but you
would not accept nude pictures of you to be taken and published. There are
levels of security too. And of ease of use. And of performance. Etc.
Often, trade-offs between those features (again: they are not freedoms) must
be sought. 100% privacy would mean not interacting with anybody. Ever.
One of the biggest issues we face (and RMS will agree to that) is mass
surveillence.
It is. But RMS would not agree, not in 2014 and not now, that the free
software definition has anything to do with what the software does or does
not. Neither that it should.
Today we have a system in which not only imperfections are used as backdoors
but even more - we see how that system deliberately creates imperfections to
infect the computers at hardware level which even the perfect FOSS cannot
fix.
Free software developers are humans. They make errors. Sometimes bug that
become security vulnerability. We cannot promise you to write bug-free
programs. But we can respect your freedoms. Letting you control,
individually and collectively, the software you use. Including to fix bugs.
Also Mozilla's programmer clearly said that what I raised is not documented
publicly.
What matters for freedom 1 is access to the source code. Anyway, even when
there is documentation (such as in Safe Browsing's case), you are not happy.
You want to understand the source code by yourself without being a
programmer. You want programmer to make bug-free program. You want 100%
privacy + 100% security + 100% ease of use + 100% performance + etc. You
want the impossible.
Unless you think that the organizations who spy on the whole world care about
their reputation.
The spyware are not in free software distributed to the spied users, who can
discover the spyware by freedom 1.
Have you even looked at the logs attached to the bug report? They show it.
No. You were talking about Mozilla sharing with Amazon, Akamai, ... IP
addresses Mozilla received through telemetry. Not about your Web browser
(not Mozilla) communicating with third parties to provide other services than
telemetry. The privacy implications of every other service should be
independently assessed to deem the trade-off "positive for most users given
the added value of the service" or "negative for most users". I know you
disagree, but I will repeat it: details matter.
