bigquery-etl
bromite
bigquery-etl | bromite | |
---|---|---|
2 | 496 | |
223 | 5,702 | |
0.4% | 0.4% | |
9.9 | 0.0 | |
4 days ago | 4 months ago | |
Python | ||
Mozilla Public License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
bigquery-etl
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Each Firefox download has a unique identifier
I don't know how many folks will see this, and of those that do I don't expect many will necessarily be moved by what I say here. I'm going to say it anyways, however, and then I may never look at this thread again. I'm the person who designed the download token scheme that is discussed in this article, and, while I understand all of the concerns and suspicions, I believe that the way we designed this and the way we handle our telemetry data means that this is not the privacy violation some of you are claiming it is. Also, to be clear, I am speaking for myself here, these are my own thoughts and opinions, and I am not representing Mozilla in any official capacity.
So, a download token is a UUID associated with a unique download event. It gets generated when you click the 'download' link, added to the installer, and then passed through to the installed browser. It is returned to us in the telemetry pings that the browser sends back to our telemetry ingestion endpoints. When the download happens, on the server side we capture the download token and the GA session ID and store those in a table. There is nothing else stored in this table.
Having access to this table means that you can correlate the user's activity on the Mozilla website that GA provides with the telemetry data that Firefox sends us. The website activity contains URLs that the user visited, so we consider this "category 3" data (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection#Data_Collection_Cat...), quite sensitive. For that reason this table has highly restricted access, only a small number of individuals are able to get to it.
Access restrictions offer no protection against subpoenas, of course. But I believe you can safely maintain your anonymity by opting out of our telemetry gathering, because when you opt out of telemetry we delete all of the historical telemetry data we have collected for your Firefox profile. Everything, including all of the records that contain the download token.
If this happens, all we are left with is that original record with the download token and a GA session. The download token can no longer be correlated with your telemetry data, and we have no way of associating your Firefox installation with your GA session, not even under subpoena. And this is all assuming that you haven't blocked GA, or that you haven't specified 'Do Not Track' before visiting our website. If you've done either of those things, we won't have a GA session ID for you to begin with.
Oh, incidentally, we never store any IP addresses or other PII in our telemetry data. That all gets scrubbed during ingestion.
Again, I don't expect this to have much impact, but I'm sharing what I know to counter some of the more extreme claims that this removes the ability for Firefox users to remain anonymous.
Finally, we have the obvious question: Why we would even do this? Believe it or not, understanding your user base does actually have some value in serving that user base. For most of Firefox's existence, there has been no trustable feedback loop. Sure, folks out there in the world have opinions, and share them, but opinions differ, and anecdotes are not data. If one person thinks most users will like a particular change, and someone else thinks they won't, nobody can prove their point in any meaningful way. The folks making decisions about Firefox have been flying blind. And, as many of you in this thread have pointed out, it hasn't necessarily been going that well.
In Firefox's early years, there was lots of low hanging fruit, and the competition was a poorly maintained Internet Explorer, so it was easy to win a bunch of market share. Then Chrome came on the scene with their effectively limitless budget and famously data driven product process. We'll never match their budget, but we can try to make choices based on data instead of just letting whoever has the most organizational power decide. My team has spent the last few years building out a data infrastructure that we hope will support better decision making going forward while still trying to honor user privacy and choice. This is a tough balance to strike, and we're far from perfect, but we do our best.
You can learn about or data collection infrastructure and policies in great detail on our docs site (https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html), and you can see nearly all of the code that handles our data ingestion and processing in our public repositories (https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion and https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl).
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Firefox Is the Only Alternative
I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data.
Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.
I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.
bromite
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The confusing CalyxOS-supplied Chromium
Our goal with the Chromium provided in CalyxOS has been to provide a browser with a solid base of privacy and security enhancements vs Chromium (and by extension, vs Chrome) while still allowing most sites and WebView-based apps to function as expected out of the box. We do this by using select changes from Cromite (and prior to that, Bromite). Some of these include the under-the-hood deactivation of intrusive features and analytics, while others provide additional site settings to adjust features like WebGL and WebRTC, features which are sometimes necessary but which can aid in fingerprinting or identification when turned on. We also bring in the legacy ad blocker from Bromite/Cromite to offer some reasonable protection from the worst kinds of ads. You can find and adjust these features in Settings.
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Top 10 Android Apps in 2013 (not available on the Google Play Store)
https://github.com/bromite/bromite Browser (based on Chrome)
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Nexus 7 Flox: flo-deb_clamor_repartition_20201203.zip unavailable
Normally, I'd recommend Bromite as a lightweight Chromium-based browser with built-in adblocking, but the project appears to be asleep right now. It might be worth checking it in a few weeks, though.
- Should I get the Bromite SystemWebView?
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Alternative to Samsung Internet - Android browser with bottom back & forward buttons (not hidden)
Bromite via either its site/Fdroid, GitHub or Woolyss site has a bottom bar available in accessibility settings. (The first one has been unmaintained for a while, but has auto updates available if they ever drop. The other two are up to date but must be updated manually.)
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the best browser
Bromite hasn't been updated since December: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/releases
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Daniel Micay steps down as the leader of GrapheneOS. My thoughts and why you should keep using it.
context: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141
- Did Louis Rossman gaslight his audience about grapheneOS's lead developer?
- At what point do you stop caring about your privacy?
- GrapheneOS – Corporate FOSS loving witch hunting crybullies feat. PrivacyGuides and DivestOS
What are some alternatives?
go-bouncer - A Go version of the redirector portion of bouncer.
brave-browser - Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.
gcp-ingestion - Documentation and implementation of telemetry ingestion on Google Cloud Platform
ungoogled-chromium - Google Chromium, sans integration with Google
standards-positions
mulch
browser-laptop - [DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
Mull - [DEPRECATED See Mull-Fenix] Build scripts for a web browser built upon Mozilla technology
elinks - Fork of elinks
ungoogled-chromium-android - Android build for ungoogled-chromium
gecko-dev - Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org. How to contribute: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html
iceraven-browser - Iceraven Browser