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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

It seems wrong to assume malice

Eh, they snuck in a hidden extension to specifically send telemetry for people who don't want to send telemetry, and expressed publicly that that was the intent behind the extension.

I'm not really assuming much malice there. I am assuming malice in how they'll use the data, but given their past track record of removing features based on telemetry data, I don't think I'm making too big a leap.

But if they embedded the feature into the core rather than into an extension, that would have been okay? Seriously, you're complaining about an implementation detail.

You mistaken, the issue is not about extension or core, the issue is that they specifically added code to track and monitor people who expressedly choose not to be tracked or monitored by mozilla.

telemetry used to be opt in, it's been changed to opt out. And now those who have opted out have their own special telemetry that cannot be disabled.

Unless you never use your web browser to visit any website ever, I just don't see what the issue is here. The information they're gathering is outrageously trivial and thoroughly anonymised.

This whole discussion shows an absurd lack of perspective by some people, particularly in the light of what Chrome does... or what Android does... or what LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE TCP CONNECTION TO LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE ON THE INTERNET does...

The intent was to express publicly, and then send an update that reflected this.

Would it feel less "[sneaked] in" if this were a core feature in Firefox?

Hardly anyone sets out to do something malicious. They do something that they didn't think anyone would object to. Even if it's the same class of thing that they've been slapped for in the past, this time is different.

The effect of malice is frequently separate from the intent of malice.

How could they possibly believe that people would not object to ? there's a long list of people objecting to telemetry when it is raised as a justification for poor choices imposed by mozilla such as dropping alsa and forcing pulseaudio on linux user.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice."

There's quite a long string of such events that points to either cluelessness or malice.

Irrelevant. If you don't want telemetry and you opt-out, don't send telemetry data!

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