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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

Your stance is paradoxical, because Chrome has been improved based on data mined from users, and not in as nearly a considerate way as Mozilla is proposing.

You want Firefox to succeed as a browser, but to be able to better compete it needs better usage data.

Wouldn't you prefer for Firefox to be the best browser available, AND also be considerate towards your privacy rights?

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Company A does bad thing which benefits them massively, allowing them to have a better product. Some people dislike that approach and flock to company B which promises not to do the bad thing. Now company B start doing the same thing 'for better good' but promises to 'keep it moderate'.

At this point why would anyone stay with the company B which broke its promise once, just in the hope that it won't break the promise again? It has already lost the trustworthiness and it also has the worse product. Might as well use products from company A.

This is specious reasoning. Company B is not doing "the same thing" at all. Company B is collecting data, but not only is it far more limited (e.g. collecting domains instead of URLs), it's done in a way that protects privacy. You can't just throw up your hands and say "well, they're collecting some data, therefore we may as well just throw away all privacy protections and use the browser by the company whose business model is based on collecting all the personal information they possibly can".

Privacy is not a boolean.

Opt-Out vs Opt-In is a question of consent. Do you value your own benefits more than my own right to determine my own life?

If yes (and that’s what you get when you choose opt-out), then we’re done. There is no gradual change there, it’s a binary question if you value the user or your own benefit more.

The world is not black & white. If Firefox starts collecting a small amount of data in a privacy-sensitive manner and makes it opt-out, that does not at al make it equivalent to e.g. Google collecting all the user data it can.

But it means they have an equal value system: Convenience being always more important than Privacy.

And that’s strictly incompatible with mine.

Except that's not true. Firefox collecting a small amount of data in a privacy-aware manner does not mean "convenience being always more important than privacy", not by a long shot. I don't understand why you're insisting on such an absolute black & white viewpoint.

Firefox being so arrogant to presume I want to collect the data by default is a very rude thing. You don’t just assume someone wants it, and do it for them, especially if it might hurt them.

First ask, then fuck up. Is that concept so hard to understand?

If you’d do that IRL to someone they’d never talk to you again, it’s the same with Firefox if they do this.

Firefox collecting data in of itself isn't at all rude, or problematic. Nobody cares if Mozilla has "data". What they care about is if they collect data that violates the user's privacy. The whole point of RAPPOR and differential privacy is it's an approach to collecting data that is supposed to preserve user privacy. So the real question is, does it preserve user privacy sufficiently that it's ok to make something opt-out instead of opt-in? But that's not what you're complaining about, you're just ranting because they're collecting data, period, without actually understanding the extent to which your privacy is being violated (if at all).

And of course this all started with you saying that you may as well switch to another company's products, a company which you know violates your privacy quite significantly. You still haven't explained why Firefox collecting a small amount of data in a way that tries to minimize any privacy violations means you should just give up any semblance of privacy and use a product that tries to collect as much personal information as possible.

First off, I’m a developer myself. A developer in the EU. In Germany. Working on open source. In fact, on open source with goals to preserve privacy.

I’ve dealt with these issues before myself.

And I understand well what they collect, how, and why. I understand how painful it is when you have no data on what is used, and how, or not even crashreports.

But there also is a limit to how far you can go, and where consent is required.

And when transmitting anything, or collecting anything, consent is required.

You could make it dependent on situation. If a performance issue occurs, show a bar: "Is this website slow? Click [Here] to submit a report so it can be improved. [Details] [X] Always submit".

This gives the user a far better understanding of what is submitted, why it is needed, it is contextual, and it is still opt-in (but with far better conversion)

If Google does not respect my privacy, why is the proposed way to gather information based on Google's approach?

And if the way Mozilla gathers data is much more considerate, what results can I expect from it? Better parallel requests and data fetching, hardware acceleration, etc are all features that are missing for me as a Linux user. They don't need my dataset for that, it's probably all in their bug tracker.

Wouldn't you prefer for Firefox to be the best browser available, AND also be considerate towards your privacy rights?

I prefer absolute privacy over some minor advantages on irrelevant webpages.

How do you even think this system would work in restricted environments such as governments where even the presence of code that could collect data is an absolute no-go?

Your stance is paradoxical, because you already stated Chrome is willing to go farther to improve their browser.

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