Mozilla Has Likely Been Sharing Aggregated Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default
www.quippd.com
TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This included data about advertising within Firefox’s New Tab page, along with a lot of other technical information about the installation of Firefox. The Firefox preferences UI makes no mention of usage of this technical data for advertising purposes. Mozilla has also recently shared that they share data with their advertising partners “on a de-identified or aggregated basis”. Mozilla has given no indication that this is a new occurrence.

TL;DR: With Firefox 56, Mozilla combined Firefox Health Report and Telemetry data into a single setting called “technical and interaction data”, which was then enabled by default. This data was then shared with advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Read the post and I don’t understand how the author reached the conclusion that this has been happening since 2017. They enabled telemetry by default in 2017, but there’s no proof that data started being sold starting then.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      16·
      2 days ago

      Did you see that the privacy policy was updated to use Technical & Interaction data to “suggest relevant content”?

      It’s a package deal.

      • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        The “suggest relevant content” refers to their sponsors like websites that show up on the front page. It’s not evidence that they actually sold that data to other companies.

        • pory@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          To get rewarded for having those sponsors, Mozilla needs to inform those sponsors that its users clicked the sponsors. How would they do that without sending data about how many users clicked the sponsors? Any monetization of an Internet feature requires some form of tracking to be implemented.

        • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
          11·
          2 days ago

          I’m a little confused about where we disagree - but it might make it simpler to clarify that I said “shared”, not sold. That seems to be exactly what they are saying in the privacy notices from both 2017 and today.

          Whether it was sold and what that entailed isn’t something we’re going to be able to know without Mozilla telling us.

          • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            There’s a big difference, the old privacy policy is written like Mozilla processed that data themselves to suggest sponsors, not that they shared that data with other companies.

            • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
              21·
              2 days ago

              I agree - so the question is if anything changed – Mozilla has said that they are just clarifying their existing usage of data. Hence my read. Yes, this implies that Mozilla was previously deceptive and is being more transparent today, but that is also what they are saying.

              If you disagree, I’d be curious to see where we see that Mozilla has explained that the new Privacy Notice is describing new practices by Mozilla rather than a clarification of their existing practice – basically, why do you believe that.