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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Uh, just go into the settings? It's right there.

Uh. Just spell out your concerns and /why/ you need a fork to address them? Or provide a link that does so.

Because I don't want browsing or other behavior data sent to a third party. Does that really need to be explained?

We don't know what you're referring to. What you haven't is explained is what shady tracking you're accusing Firefox of doing, or what to turn off in the settings. Going into about:config and searching for "shady tracking" returns zero results.

* "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"

* "Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations"

* "Allow Firefox to install and run studies"

* "Block dangerous and deceptive content"

* "Pocket" add-on installed by default.

I don't recall opting in to any of these things when I installed firefox. This isn't some conspiracy or hard to understand concept. They are right there in the settings page, not in the config flags, and I don't understand why it's so difficult to believe this or just look yourself.

Yo, other people aren't inside your head, and don't know what you're thinking. It's obvious to you what you're thinking, but until you say it out loud and communicate with us, I can't know if the "shady tracking" setting you're thinking about is the one about Dns over Https or the ones you mentioned or the fact that it's not all routed via Tor/a VPN. we're willing to believe you, and I'm able to look for myself, but you gotta give us something (which you did, thanks). What's hard to understand is where you are coming from. It's easy for me to believe that Firefox is acting "shady", but saying only that much, and no more, is banal and uninteresting. People are willing to do their homework, but you have to tell them what textbook you're working out of and which chapter you're in. I can't see, over the Internet, your reading history so it's impossible, not just difficult, without any frame of reference, to know what you believe is shady or even where you've looked.

Anyway. why does the installation of the Pocket seem so shady to you? There are a number of other features in the program you just installed that you probably weren't aware of. I mean, I didn't read the full source of Firefox before installing it, so there are many features now on my computer that I didn't know I was getting into when I installed Firefox. Is it the fact that Pocket (which Mozilla bought) has a premium tier that causes you to classify it as "shady"?

Yeah fair points.

By my measure, any telemetry sent back that wasn't explicitly opted into is shady. Once data has left my machine, it's out of my control and anything can happen to it.

We may not have time to fully audit the source, but individuals and groups I trust have, and have made forks that cut out this telemetry as well as other potentially unsavory features. One can also monitor network traffic in and out of an a browser app to understand what is being sent.

I'm using Bromite on my phone right now to type this.

We were interested in what you were talking about and now we know because you've actually said. That's the way this site is supposed to work. Generally considered a good thing when people are interested in what you have to say, putting barriers in the way seems less than an ideal strategy.

So there are five settings that you believe are set to the wrong default. This causes you to mistrust firefox in total and want to use a fork that you deem more trustworthy but haven't mentioned any fork or how you decided that they are more trustworthy.

That is all 100% totally and utterly reasonable and we can take it on board and use it to adjust our views or not now that we know what you're talking about.

Thanks for posting it clearly that is worth the time it takes. The inital comment is mostly noise and in my view, not worth posting.

I also have a different definition of shady than he's using. A setting clearly and prominently described on the options is not shady in by book, regardless of the default.

Would I prefer Firefox had different defaults? Yes. But, I will reserve the word shady for the products actually doing shady things like telemetry in Windows that requires jumping through hoops to turn off.

> I also have a different definition of shady than he's using. A setting clearly and prominently described on the options is not shady in by book, regardless of the default.

It is shady because new settings appear with updates. Surely you don't expect users to trawl through all settings for each browser update to see if Mozilla didn't sneak anything in there that undoes part of their previous choices?

You can view your actual telemetry data shared with Mozilla in your Firefox's about:telemetry page. No website browsing history is sent to Mozilla.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

Doesn’t Firefox ask about all these settings on install/first start?

Not all of them

Source?

First party: go to the settings and look.

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