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Comment by qplex | Hacker News Reader

>and even send them telemetry data when you disable telemetry! -- they can also remotely change your Firefox settings and/or install "experiments", at any time, without any notice to you!

Please don't spread fud and lies.

While Firefox makes some connections on start-up, it will not send any telemetry data or install studies once you've disabled them.

You can check about:telemetry and about:studies

Mozilla is quite transparent about what is being collected.

See https://telemetry.mozilla.org/ and https://data.firefox.com/

Having said this, I fully agree with you. A browser (or any other piece of software) should not make any connections anywhere unless instructed by the user.

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> Mozilla is quite transparent about what is being collected.

You're right. In fact, according to Mozilla themselves [0]:

> Finally, we need better insight into our opt-out rates for telemetry. We use telemetry to ensure new features improve your user experience and to guide Mozilla’s business decisions. However, an unknown portion of our users do not report telemetry for a variety of reasons.

> ...

> To address this, we will measure Telemetry Coverage, which is the percentage of all Firefox users who report telemetry.

Fortunately, this totally-not-telemetry telemetry can be disabled too [1]:

> ... this extension has a special boolean opt-out pref: "toolkit.telemetry.coverage.opt-out".

Just create that pref and set it to true.

---

[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri...

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487578#c1

So they push this background addon to 1% of users that tells them if Telemetry is enabled or not. This is much better than some vague claim.

What about the other things you mentioned?

>changing your Firefox settings and/or install "experiments", at any time, without any notice to you!

Never had this happen to me.

Look up "Firefox Normandy" and "Firefox Shield".

What's to look up?

Firefox studies was called project Shield before.

Disable studies and it's gone.

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