I personally feel like it's not treating user's privacy as "fundamental" to increasingly add telemetry like this. In this case correlating downloads to system installs, and to have that on by default.
It's fairly hidden first off (what % of users are going to watch the checksums or read these articles?). You also don't seem to get a chance to opt-out of this until after the installation when you can open settings in a normal use case, yet as explained here[1] they'll be attaching the download token to the install and post-install pings[2] which include system information which seems to enable tracking people via metadata across systems.
The "optional" bit is maybe open to interpretation, but if taken literally it's tracking that's on by default, so the privacy is "optional" here in that sense.
I get this isn't a big deal for a lot of people, but I dislike that Mozilla has a "manifesto" and talks a huge game about empowering users and privacy when they're treating them as secondary priorities rather than actual principles. It strikes me as disingenuous to claim it's a principle then have a bunch of "buts" in there that are increasingly moving away from the alleged principle, even if it isn't nefarious.
I believe you can opt out by having your browser send the Do No Track (DNT) header when you download Firefox. This applies to all analytics on Mozilla.org.
It's fairly hidden first off (what % of users are going to watch the checksums or read these articles?). You also don't seem to get a chance to opt-out of this until after the installation when you can open settings in a normal use case, yet as explained here[1] they'll be attaching the download token to the install and post-install pings[2] which include system information which seems to enable tracking people via metadata across systems.
The "optional" bit is maybe open to interpretation, but if taken literally it's tracking that's on by default, so the privacy is "optional" here in that sense.
I get this isn't a big deal for a lot of people, but I dislike that Mozilla has a "manifesto" and talks a huge game about empowering users and privacy when they're treating them as secondary priorities rather than actual principles. It strikes me as disingenuous to claim it's a principle then have a bunch of "buts" in there that are increasingly moving away from the alleged principle, even if it isn't nefarious.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 [2] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...