> Is this privacy flop > inadvertent or is it deliberate? It's hard to say. The data sent does provide some benefit that I think could be desirable for many users, but as heyjoe has said users should be aware of it and have an easy way to disable it. Maybe Mozilla intends for the automatic connections to be benign, believes that so few users would want to disable them that it is not worth the trouble of an option to disable them in Preferences, and has some broken documentation that is at least partially related to changes in Firefox (I should try again with ESR). Maybe Mozilla is malicious and the benefits of these automatic connections are simply a cover for their real goals. Maybe Mozilla consists of some well-meaning people who believe they are doing the former and some malicious individuals who are exploting their labor to use it against Firefox users.
> That is, you can steer them - with much effort - into > correction of all the 3 points. But would it matter at all, to > figth them in lower levels when they have a high level policy of > giving user privacies away to 3rd parties? At minimum it would benefit the Icecat and Abrowser developers, as they would not have to choose between fixing this issue themselves or spending that time doing other useful work. This is especially true with Abrowser. Anything that saves Ruben time will help him to wrap up Trisquel 8 sooner. If all three points are fixed and many users disable some of these connections, Mozilla may find that they were wrong to assume that not many users would prefer to do so (assuming that this is their real reason, which it may not be), which could inform their policy more broadly. > would you trust Ubuntu anymore just > because they have corrected their minor policies under community > pressure? Nope, but I'm glad they did for several reasons. One is that no one can defend Ubuntu's actions now that they've implicitly acknowledged that they were wrong by stopping them. Another is that the fewer antifeatures Ruben has to remove from Ubuntu to ensure that Trisquel is privacy-respecting the more time he can spend on other work. > Think about it: Mozilla did decide to collect user specifics and > forward this info to 3rd parties, didn't they? This decision cannot > be haphazard or inadvertent. It is a sober, deliberate decision. > Not a bug. And you will be trying to fight against that decision > through bug reports. You might be right, but I'm uncertain. Mozilla may be selling data for extra profit, but I don't believe it is integral to their business model, so there is at least a chance of them deciding that it is not worth the risk to their reputation. In contrast, I wouldn't even consider bothering to press Google or Facebook on this, because selling data is their business model and they would go out of business if they stopped, and because unlike Mozilla they don't rely on having the appearance of being privacy-friendly for marketing. Quite the opposite, they try to make their users disregard the value of privacy itself. > You might be wasting your time and energy. This very well may be true.. Part of the reason I want to start with the documentation bug is to get a sense of how productive additional efforts will be. I think that going that far has some potential reward and negligible risk. > But > may be FSF can do something about this. So the best route of > action, I believe, is escalating this to FSF's attention. Yes. The kind of high-level policy change that we really need will require a lot of people paying attention to the issue, something we can't achieve but that the FSF could. This creates another potential benefit to these bug reports that will occur if we *fail*. Right now some people might look at the bug report and conclude that Mozilla's response is reasonable. While heyjoe is right in the substance of what he was saying, the conversation started out a little rocky which may distract people from the validity of the points he made. If we give up now and leave it there then we have not made the issue look as serious as it should. However, if we continue to push until Mozilla runs out of excuses, it will be much more obvious that there is a real problem here. This would incentivize the FSF to make this a priority and give them more ammunition should they decide to act.
