bigquery-etl VS privacytests.org

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).

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.

No, https://privacytests.org/ is misleading, it shows only the results of the default browser settings - which absolutely nobody uses.

So as far as hardened chromium forks go brave is the best and all there really is. For Firefox based hardened browsers unless you feel like manually hardened stock FF yourself, librewolf and mullvad browser (mull on Android) which leads me to Tor but with the drawbacks that make it less practical for certaint things mullvad known for their VPN that is is very bignin privacy so much you have nothing that ties to it like 99% of anything now days as yoi have anonimity bcnyoinoau with cash-crypro-or use a voucher no name email address phone number bank etc to sign upso they partner with then tor project and made a clearnet version of tor hardened fingerprint resistant as well as cookies scripts ect multiple identity proxy and built-in security that tor has standard safer safest with no script uBo and and their VPN and dns to take the place of tors multiple relay and encryption that is the tor network with no telemetry you hide in plain site as all the other using it look like you. You can n use this browsers like you would brave or your "main' so history bookmarks passwords etc but that defeats the purpose IMO but librewolf is also very hardened fingerprint resistant focused but you can use it like were using brave and still have the privacy and security and convenience. I use all 4 with different search engines depending on what I'm looking for or doing and of in have to use chrome then ungoogled Chromium on desktop and cromite on Android (fork of bromite which lost support from the devs) mull brave and cromite on is what in use on mobile. This isn't a complete list as FOSS for mobile has quite a few to try these are my favorite, Firefox focus on Android is Worth mentioning too. Sorry for the incoherent book. https://privacytests.org/

you mean https://privacytests.org ?

librewolf https://privacytests.org/ for ios/android brave all the way https://privacytests.org/ios, https://privacytests.org/android

careful with brave https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/?amp https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726 among other things like the most popular browser compare site being owned by brave employees https://privacytests.org/ i guess when they say privacy they mean it, keeping things private from you too

https://privacytests.org/ he eventually disclosed his employer in the back area of that website somewhere so thats better i guess.

another one is how certain settings on brave search always reverts back on. or just one the send analytics one. if you use search on a different browser not their own. and etc.

and firefox is funded in large part by google.. do you really think they dont share information?

honestly acting like your browser is superior because no tracking is so silly lol. just use whatever browser you want and tune settings to your liking. harden if you must and move on. is it that much of a hassel? would you rather pay subscription for no tracking?

This site is constantly updated, so there is no need to have the same question all the time. https://privacytests.org/

Something to get you started : privacytests.org