Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data
(blog.mozilla.org)
from sverit@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 14 May 2024 15:27
https://lemmy.ml/post/15632226
from sverit@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 14 May 2024 15:27
https://lemmy.ml/post/15632226
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Importantly, if you have already opted out of sending data to Mozilla, this change will not affect you. It only sends data if you have the setting turned on. It takes just a few clicks to entirely disable it, and Mozilla deletes all record of your browser within 30 days from turning off this feature. If you’re worried about it, do it now, it’s just under Settings > Privacy & Security. Instructions are also linked in the blog post.
I’m not a fan of the telemetry being enabled by default but having the option to completely disable it makes it not that bad. Though Mozilla definitely doesn’t need search history data (unless the law enforcements told them to collect it) so this change is kinda sus
It seems like a profit-driven thing to me. Big piles of anonymized data are worth a pretty penny.
Mozilla famous non-profit status notwithstanding of course
Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned subsidiary that is Mozilla Corporation that is for-profit.
For instance the revenue from Google, so they’re the default search engine, is seen by Mozilla Corporation. So things search-related will indeed be part of their for-profit arm.
I’d like to read more on that if you have anything. Seems like too big a loophole ?
It’s not a loophole. As a subsidiary, profits are still invested into the nonprofit and they’re still guided by the Mozilla manifesto. It just lets them do more and raise more funds which would be difficult to do with nonprofit status (selling default search engine for instance). Here’s their original press release when they incorporated Mozilla Corporation in 2005.
It’s technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.
Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that’s independent of for-/non-profit status.
A non-profit can, in fact, profit, but it has specific rules on what it can do with those profits. Tax law is a rabbit hole and I don’t even wanna peer in
Used to work for a non-profit retirement community in a pretty small area; the guy running the joint lived in a $3M “house” with a full 7 car garage.
Enshitification hits every company, even Mozilla.
Unfortunately Mozilla is being run by a McKinsey consultant.
From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.
Then what’s the point in collecting such data? It won’t help to fix bugs, add new features or even make useful statistics to show publicly. Only personalized ads is what comes to mind. Yes it seems to be anonymized well enough but still ad companies love such data. Maybe Mozilla wants to implement a custom ads functionality that uses this data or they just want to sell it idk. Still changes in this direction are kinda sus
I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for
weatherthere, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you’re actually searching for.
First thing I do on every Firefox installation on every device. 3 clicks and most of this nonsense stops.
I’d appreciate Mozilla not doing something like that in the first place, maybe don’t try to build products and focus on the browser. 🤷♂️
I’d just like for these things to be opt-in, not opt-out.
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i know they’re a company and they need to float, but this should be opt in not opt out
Yes but we really should be grateful to have a somewhat mainstream open-source browser with a great ecosystem of extensions and ability to turn off the telemetry. It could’ve been much worse
I see no problem with this logic.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Chromium is pretty good too but usually it’s not recommended to support because nobody wants its engine to become an absolute monopoly and make all major websites in the world broken on any other one. Though nobody wants Firefox’s engine to become an absolute monopoly too so it’s nice that Chromium exists
Manifest V3. Enough said.
Opt-in telemetry is useless telemetry, they make it opt-out because its the only way to get representative numbers
Why do you need unwilling representing numbers in the first place? Just ask advanced users on the official forum about what they want to see added. You only really need error logs that are absolutely opt-in
“advanced users” on forums are rarely very representive of users as a whole.
I have not seen a single case where advanced users have the same opinions as the average one
The number of people who actually change their default settings is quite small. Those of us who have these discussions are a distinct minority in the sum userbase.
I used this fact a lot in arguments and I agree. What I’m saying is that it could be worse
And I agree with you.
This looks fine, the browser just puts your search into a category like “health” or “tech”, then sends the amount of each category completely anonymously.
Also, if you’ve opted out of data collection already that setting applies to this too.
I agree. I am someone who values their privacy and often does not like opt-out style analytics however I also know opt-in skews analytics. The way the searches are only categorized, and they are using Oblivious HTTP keeping IP addresses private makes me A-OK with this.
This is the best take so far, I totally agree
The important part that you should know (and should already be using):
They should have put more emphasis on the possible usages for what they find out...
Buddy, I just want to type a search term and get results. Stop spying on my search. Your only job is to transfer it to the server and then present the result. I don’t need you to suggest some bullshit to me, or think of “ways to improve search”.
No. What the fuck? They are sounding more and more like Google. We need a new alternative that isn’t built from Gecko or Blink or whatever the engines are called.
Anti Commercial-AI license
lol use a fork - I’m sure they’ll have it turned off. Writing a browser engine is non-trivial.
Telemetry can help them do better at providing that. Devs aren't magical beings, they don't know what's working and what's not unless someone tells them.
That’s like saying the window pane between me and the teller has to understand the conversation and dynamically modify the light between him and I. The window pane’s only job is to let light through. Keep it at that.
Anti Commercial-AI license
No, this analogy would make more sense if it was a matter of recording a large number of interactions between customers and tellers to ensure that the window isn't interfering with their interactions. Is the window the right size? Can the customer and teller hear each other through it? Is that little hole at the bottom large enough to let through the things they need to physically exchange? If you deploy the windows and then never gather any telemetry you have no idea whether it's working well or if it could be improved.
You’re describing telemetry to improve the overall performance of the window. That’s very different from what Mozilla: listening in to what is sent between the teller and I. They even gave an example of a trip to Spain and recording it as travel. That’s going way beyond the performance of a window. The teller is probably already doing that. The window operator has no business listening in on that discussion nor recording even a summary of details of the discussion.
Anti Commercial-AI license
The analogy isn't perfect, no analogy ever is.
In this case the content of the search is all that really matters for the quality of the search. What else would you suggest be recorded, the words-per-minute typing speed, the font size? If they want to improve the search system they need to know how it's working, and that involves recording the searches.
It's anonymized and you can opt out. Go ahead and opt out. There'll still be enough telemetry for them to do their work.
Telemetry doesn’t need topic categorization. This is building a dataset for AI.
That would be a terrible AI.
The example of the “search optimization” they want to improve is Firefox Suggest, which has sponsored results which could be promoted (and cost more) based on predictions of interest based on recent trends of topics in your country. “Users in Belgium search for vacations more during X time of day” is exactly the sort of stuff you’d use to make ads more valuable. “Users in France follow a similar pattern, but two weeks later” is even better. Similarly predicting waves of infection based on the rise and fall of “health” searches is useful for public health, but also for pushing or tabling ad campaigns.
There are definitely 2 kinds of people commenting this post. The first one who supports telemetry (and Big Tech) and another one that supports freedom and opt-in. This is interesting to see on something like Lemmy. I think the ones who support telemetry are devs and it is a little bit concerning to me
No one supports telemetry. People support Mozilla, because they are the maintainers of the last standard respecting, open source and independent browse engine.
That’s pretty important as Microsoft and Google etc are trying to take possession of the internet for themselves .
I am a dev and I do not support telemetry
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Same. If It’s to exist at all, it should be opt-in and explicit about what it’s doing.
This isn’t even telemetry, it’s data collection for AI. That they refused to say that let’s you know that they think what they’re doing needs to be obfuscated.
If they refused to say it how do you know its the case? Also how would the data described in the article be useful to an ai, genuine question.
In life, people will frequently say things to you that won’t be the whole truth, but you can figure out what’s actually going on by looking at the context of the situation. This is commonly referred to as “being deceptive” or sometimes just “lying”. Corporate PR and salespeople, the ones who put out this press release, do it regularly.
You don’t need to record content categories of searches to make a good tool for displaying websites, you need it to perform predictions about what users will search for. They’ve already said they wanted to focus on AI and linked to an example of the system they want to improve, it’s their site recommender, complete with sponsored recommendations that could be sold for a higher price if the Mozilla AI could predict that “people in country X will soon be looking for vacations”.
I support anonymous telemetry collected by a small non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.
Its exactly this kind of bullshit that firefox should not do...
All we want is 1990s Google, guys. That’s really all we want. None of this AI BS that kind find a country in Africa that starts with a K, just Google without the evil enshitification layer on top.
I think people forget how awful google pre ~2008 was. Not in terms of the bullshit they do nowadays, just in quality of results really.
Huh. I used it pretty much since the start and I certainly don’t recall it being that bad? Like you got a lot of relevant content up front usually.
I feel like you had to learn how to use it, operators and phrasing etc. They dumbed it down with search suggestions and even further by changing search terms to synonyms, and now outright ignoring terms. Height of Internet search was definitely pre 2008. More like 2005.
If you had the right query, yes. But getting there if you didn’t know the exact words in the website used to take a number of attempts and google-fu. By early 2010s this was vastly improved.
I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.
No pr0n?
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Inconclusive = pr0n is probably a pretty reliable mapping.
I’m on the “OK but keep an eye on it” train, here.
Devs need feedback to know how people are using the product, and opt-out tracking is the best way to do it. In this case, it seems like my personal data is completely unidentifiable.
I was coding in the IE6 era, so I’d really prefer to not end up in a browser engine monoculture again.
I don’t need freaking suggestions from the browser, that’s the job of the search engine of my choice.
most search engines don’t keep anonymous search data so that’s what firefox is trying to fix.
You’re right, i tend to forget the majority uses Google as the default
I want freaking suggestions from the browser though, in a way that respects my privacy
Maybe switch to a search engine respecting it.
I use Kagi and DuckDuckGo, but some users may still be on Google.
So you gain nothing.
I like that the option is there, don’t be an elitist.
Souds good to me overall, only if what they’re saying is true. If they deviate from it, I guess we’ll have to look for new browser.
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As well as profits and corporate interests.
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.
Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.
Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.
I genuinely didn’t know all that. Thanks for bringing that up. I’ve been lazy and told myself countless times I should switch to LibreWolf. Now’s the time.
If you use the “AdGuard URL Tracking Protection” under Privacy in uBlock Origin. Also add Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool & ClearURLs for uBo. You don’t need ClearURL.
You can add lists by going to Filter lists -> Import… at the bottom of the page -> C&P the URL in the box -> Apply Changes -> Done.
Interesting… I wasn’t aware of ClearURLs for uBo. How good is that? Does it really filer all tracking elements like clear URLs does?
Based on my experience, yes.
I’ll have to test it. Better to have one less extension.
Decentraleyes is heavily outdated. Use Local CDN instead.
The Arkenfox’s wiki says not to use Local CDN or Decentraleyes.
First of all, Lunduke… has very funny opinions on things, as his politics massively shifted in the past 4-5 years, as someone who used to follow his rants before he became a rightwinger. His interview at Chris Titus channel was also a bit unhinged, and Titus protected him by hushing him a fair bit.
Secondly, unique IDs are only a thing when you download the Firefox online installer stub from their website. If you download the offline installer from their website or from any decent Windows software site (Majorgeeks, Filehorse et al), this is not a problem. Also, this is not at all a problem on Linux, since the software installation method is fully centralised.
What I will criticise is CEOs have been leeches at Mozilla. Emily Baker has been an absolute leech, and there is no denying about it. The new CEO is also a leech. But that has not affected Firefox. It may, however, affect Firefox as the developer money is snatched by CEOs. What has affected Firefox is how the world has shaped up, and people are okay with having less privacy because western elites have helped create that ecosystem for masses to cuck themselves. I am not going to honk trumpets for their inclusive politics like a liberal, but it has allowed to distance them from clowns like Brendan Eich, which has been fairly helpful.
Also your point about UGC using uBO is nonsense. Manifest V3 simply disallows the full capabilities of uBO on Chromium browsers due to its hard cap on memory limits. Raymond Hill has a lot of words to say about it. uBO Lite is about as good as uBO easy mode but even lighter, and you cannot block selective domains or scripts at all. Not to mention, uBO on Firefox allows importing extra filter text files, which is not an option on Chromium browsers.
Firefox has customisable user.js and userchrome.css, so the former allows implementing Arkenfox’s configuration and such things.
I’m NOT sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox is as good and private after all, if you can put in a little work. You may cry, whine and bang your head about it. Your disinformation cope attempt has failed.
Why point this out? Just asking. But him being a rightwinger haves nothing to do with this.
Lunduke has a problem with Mozilla’s “politics” as a white Christian rightwinger, as do people like Luke Smith, for reasons that should not need much explanation. He fell into that rabbit hole few years ago, and wishes to remain there.
Its not so much thats he’s a right winger, its that he can’t keep politics out of his blog and he is also a total nut
Mozilla wants to be an AI company. This is data collection to support that. Telemetry to understand the user browsing experience doesn’t need to be content-categorized.
I want an open source AI to sort my tabs and understand them and answer my question about their content. But locally running and offline
Unless they’re going to publish their data, AI can’t be meaningfully open source. The code to build and train a ML model is mostly uninteresting. The problems come in the form of data and hyperparameter selection which either intentionally or unintentionally do most of the shaping of the resulting system. When it’s published it’ll just be a Python project with some magic numbers and “put data here” with no indications of what went into data selection or choosing those parameters.
I just want a command line interface to my browser, then I’ll tell my local mixtral 8x7B instance to “look in all my tabs and place all tabs about ‘magnetic loop antennas’ in a new window, order them with the most concrete build instructions first” 100% open source model. I’m looking into the marionette protocol to accomplish this. It would be nice if it came with that out of the box.
What does “open source” mean to you? Just free/noncorporate? Because a “100% open source model” doesn’t really make sense by the traditional definition. The “source” for a model is its data, not the code and not the model itself. Without the data you can’t build the model yourself, can’t modify it, and can’t inspect why it does what it does.
I think the model can be modified with LoRa without tge source data ? In any case, if the inference software is actually open source and all the necessary data is free of any intellectual property encumberances, it runs without internet access or non commodity hardware.
Then it’s open source enough to live in my browser.
You can technically modify any network weights however you want with whatever data you have lying around, but without the core training data you can’t verify that your modifications aren’t hurting the original capabilities. Fine-tuning (which LoRa is for) isn’t the same thing as modifying a trained network. You’re still generally stuck with their original trained capabilities you’re just reworking the final layer(s) to redirect/tune it towards your problem. You can’t add pet faces into a human face detector, and if a new technique comes out that could improve accuracy you can’t rebuild the model with it.
So just free/noncorporate. A model is effectively a binary and the data is the source (the actual ML code is the compiler). If you don’t get the source, it’s not open source. A binary can be free and non-corporate, but it’s still not source code.
I mean, I would prefer a data set that’s properly open, “the pile” laion, open assistant and a pirate copy is every word, song, video ever written and spoken by man.
But for now I’d be happy to fully control my browser with an offline copy of mixtral or llama
To disable it in about:config
browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled = falsebrowser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled = falselike and subscribe!
firefox develops an optional predictive search feature like every other search engine and browser has that actually protects user privacy that can easily be turned off so naturally the internet loses their mind over it and declares firefox dead.
don’t worry, it’s balanced out by the every other day threads of firefox shills screeching about how much more private it is and how it uses so much less ram.
people never want to admit that things aren’t black and white.
Will this affect libre wolf?
Nope, they cut all the Mozilla stuff out
As much as I hate to say it, Firefox is a privacy mess.
Pocket and Fakespot have very bad privacy policies. The Windows version has a unique Mozilla tracker if you download the installer from the website, and the android version has Google Analytics built in. The existing and new telemetry is a but heavy, but it’s anonymised so it’s really the lesser of the various evils.
My recommendation is LibreWolf & Fennec as alternatives.
sigh