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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the My Activity details is actually pretty creepy. Starting today working backwards, Google includes "Used Phone," "Used [my launcher]," "contacted [messaging site]," "Used [alarm clock app]," several overnight repeats of the messaging site when I received alerts, my Chrome-based website visits from yesterday, my foray into Android Settings yesterday, etc.

It all serves to make me happy that I'm using Firefox with uMatrix as my daily driver, and only use Chrome (with uBlock Origin) for the rare things that I can't get to load properly because of all the cross-site dependencies.

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Using firefox? Did you tick "Send analysis data to Mozilla"? If yes, Mozilla has the very same information about your browsing habits and all clicks and actions you performed in Firefox too.

It's just that Google shows it to you, rather than not telling you anything.

Any sufficiently big Android/iOS app has the very same system in place so that they can see what people are doing with their app and anticipate interesting features, down to the location of your finger when you touched that button, the wifis you were seeing at the time, the battery level etc.

Admitedly though, Google has such a wide reach in all your day-to-day life that they gather an immense amount of data.

But don't be fooled, anyone else is also doing it. And they are far less open about it.

If you go to about:telemetry in Firefox, you can see exactly what data is being collected.

I think most people here understand that everyone is collecting data about usage of their apps. The thing people are getting wary of is having all your habits, regardless of app or platform, in one place.

> Using firefox? Did you tick "Send analysis data to Mozilla"? If yes, Mozilla has the very same information about your browsing habits and all clicks and actions you performed in Firefox too.

That is blatantly false. The policy page here describes what is sent for each data feature in Firefox:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

Mozilla does not have tracking cookies scattered through-out the web tracking you. Google via Google Ad's and Doubleclick does (as does Facebook via their social features).

Neither the Chrome browser nor Firefox sends "your browsing habits and all clicks and actions you performed" to their respective companies. If you turn on History sync, the clients encrypt all this data before uploading.

Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla.

edit: Chrome can send all history unencrypted to Google if you ask it to, under Privacy Checkup, Web & Web App Activity: "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services". Supposedly this is to make the search more relevant. This was unchecked for me by default though.

> Chrome can send all history unencrypted to Google if you ask it to, under Privacy Checkup, Web & Web App Activity: "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services". Supposedly this is to make the search more relevant. This was unchecked for me by default though

Starting today, that is on by default, and existing users get a screen asking them to enable it – I just got it pushed to my Android phone, asking me to enable that.

The difference is I trust Mozilla and I absolutely do not trust Google. Mozilla is not in the business of abusing my private data for their profit. If they say they are only using that data for debugging, I believe them.

can you provide a link ?

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