Mozilla Announces Firefox Health Report

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
Messages
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Mozilla made the announcement today of a new feature to be incorporated into future versions of Firefox called Firefox Health Report. The new feature will gather information from the browser’s usage and send it back to the company to analyze the data, helping to make a better browser. What could possibly go wrong? :eek:

If privacy bells aren’t ringing in your head, they should be. That’s still a work in progress (which makes sense given that FHR isn’t anywhere near ready yet).
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So what exactly will FHR share with its creator? Mozilla says these four types:

Configuration data (such as device hardware, operating system, and Firefox version).
Customizations data (such as add-ons, count, and type).
Performance data (such as timing of browser events, rendering, and session restores).
Wear and Tear data (such as length of session, how old a profile is, and count of crashes).
______________________
According to the FHR FAQ:

We believe that Mozilla’s approach to FHR, which was created in consultation with our community, is a great model for balancing a user centric feature with user privacy.
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Im not exactly willing to "balance" privacy with anything... I take offense at ANY reduction in my personal privacy. increasing my level privacy apparently means getting rid of Firefox now.

too bad, i liked firefox...
 
The patient has been in this week due to morbid memory obesity and dissociative personality disorder.
 
I'd rather not share any data... However next to the amount of data google our apple collect on their phones, this is peanuts really.
 
ghost6303 said:
Im not exactly willing to "balance" privacy with anything... I take offense at ANY reduction in my personal privacy. increasing my level privacy apparently means getting rid of Firefox now.

too bad, i liked firefox...
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It's pretty similar to what Chrome does already and is actually less invasive than letting Google handle all your DNS lookups. :( Internet Explorer is really your only option if you want privacy because you can opt out of giving Microsoft any error reporting and feedback. I guess there's Opera too, but I honestly don't know anything about what it does with respect to calling home.
 
The only way to retain privacy is a tin-foil hat nowadays. o_O
 
Another reason to jump ship to an alternative like Palemoon if you can't live w/o Firefox. Or SRWare Iron if you like Chrome but hate all of it's privacy issues.
 
At this point, I just maintain my own custom version of Firefox. I got tired of installing dozens of addons to undo all of the stupid changes that the Mozilla people have done over the last few years and, at this point, it is easier to just maintain a patch set.

I will simply patch this out like all of the other stupid things the fashion developers are doing (e.g In Content Preferences, Australis stupidity, hiding the HTTP, getting rid of the statusbar, future plans to get rid of the addon bar).
 
scojer said:
The only way to retain privacy is a tin-foil hat nowadays. o_O
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Yeah pretty much this. It seems like everything these days is reporting back stats on all the stuff you do with it. Hard to get away from it these days.
 
Wow another non privacy invasive move from Mozilla and you guys go all crazy again. I can't even attempt to make a logical argument that won't piss everyone off here. Collecting performance based usage data is NOT privacy invasive! For crying out loud your ISP knows every site you goto and I'm sure no one here does pure SSL as even this site isn't encrypted. Throw in SNI and even your SSL traffic is compromised for you "protect my privacy, even though I don't even know the definition" guys.
 
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