Notice: The mods just changed the title from "Firefox secretly tracks users with Google Analytics in the addon settings" to "Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings"
@mods: The "secretly" was used to signify the fact that Mozilla does not inform users about this fact, their Privacy Policy does not cover it, and at no point does any page, modal, or disclaimer tell this.
The Privacy Policy seems to only cover '"personal information" means information which identifies you, like your name or email address."' So it's not surprising it doesn't mention GA.
The Firefox privacy policy is more explicit, but this is actually on a Mozilla page (which you can reach from other browsers), so I'm not sure it's relevant.
Yeah, I don't disagree. The increasing usage of web pages in the browser UI has made this problematic and is what caused the root problem here in the first place.
I’d argue the root cause is more that Mozilla is willing to trade away privacy for developer convenience. That they made this decision in the first place, without anyone at Mozilla saying "maybe we shouldn’t do that", is very concerning w.r.t. privacy in the rest of the browser.
Even on a Mozilla webpage I wouldn’t expect to see Google Analytics, but instead something like Piwik.
I’d argue the root cause is more that Mozilla is willing to trade away privacy for developer convenience.
Oh, not arguing that. Even with Google out of the picture entirely, Telemetry is a nice example. But I'd argue it is needed to stay relevant as a browser. So it's not a good counterargument to Mozilla's decision here.
You can see from the relevant bugs that GA vs Piwik and such were certainly considered, so people are definitely thinking about "maybe we shouldn't do that". In the case of GA, it ended up with required data silo-ing on Google's side.
> For --some people-- all firefox users that won't be enough.
The only reason people use Firefox nowadays is because they don’t trust Google. The intersection between "Trusts Google not to abuse data they get access to" and "uses Firefox" is the empty set.
Nah, as is evident by the amount of Firefox users that still have Google as their search engine.
It's a false equivalence. There is a difference between trusting Google not to abuse data they legally guaranteed not to abuse (Firefox), versus, well, pretty much plainly saying your data will be used, and knowing that the product has many features which make the tracking more pervasive and invasive (Chrome, Google Accounts, etc).
I'd love for Mozilla to not use any Google stuff at all, but I'd also love a pony.
I fully expect Google to abuse any data they think they can get away with. But I also expect Google Legal to make sure that Google adheres to the contracts they sign, and in this case they have a contract with Mozilla that requires the GA data to be silo'd. While I'd feel better if Mozilla didn't use GA at all, I also understand why they do use it, and I'm not going to pillory them over it.
This is probably a better page, as the original one linked is indeed for sending data to Mozilla. This one also talks about "service providers":
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
The question is, will you be informed about it if you only read the information that is directly linked, or shown to you, when downloading, installing, and running Firefox?
No. That’s the big issue.
You have to actively search out if Firefox tracks you to find out that this happens. That’s pretty secret.
I don't disagree with you that the information can be made more easily available. I was just responding to it not being a secret.
As an aside it suprises me that this is so blown up today (while tracking shipped a long time ago). Many complaining users will even comment or share this via their Chrome browser, which is far worse than Firefox (still not saying that Firefox is doing everything right here :) )
@mods: The "secretly" was used to signify the fact that Mozilla does not inform users about this fact, their Privacy Policy does not cover it, and at no point does any page, modal, or disclaimer tell this.