Technology

58303 readers

26 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

322

Firefox 126: New Search Data Telemetry, Improved Copy Without Site Tracking, Security Fixes, and More (www.mozilla.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development. These categories are based on 20 high-level content types, such as "sports,” "business," and "travel". This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties. (read more)

The Copy Without Site Tracking option can now remove parameters from nested URLs. It also includes expanded support for blocking over 300 tracking parameters from copied links, including those from major shopping websites. Keep those trackers away when sharing links!

Release Notes

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You're conveniently missing the point that there is an actually labeled telemarketing partner that is opt-out. That's not user habit collection. You're also missing that "random future studies" should not be auto-enabled by default either. Finally, the topic of this particular post is about categorizing search queries, which as far as they describe it isn't something your browser should care about.

The only thing that may be legitimate is, as you say, actual UX and feature usage. But for that to be done properly, you have to ask and make it opt-in, as with any data collection scheme. It's actually a requirement in some places.

The point is, people give shit to chrome because "evil google collects your habits data and monetize them", while people like you are a-ok with Firefox openly sending data to a third-party marketing partner on opt-out conditions and, as demonstrated by today's post, adding more collection that have absolutely nothing to do with the behavior of the browser and all to do with user habits.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

If you go through my comment history you’ll find me saying, multiple times, that Mozilla has worked itself into this problem, by adding far more people than they need. The browser would be healthier, I suspect, if there was a 50-strong, open-collective backed, dev team working on just the browser. At the minute the org is enormous and they now need to find a way to pay for that enormous org.