bigquery-etl
user.js
bigquery-etl | user.js | |
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2 | 682 | |
223 | 9,160 | |
0.4% | 1.8% | |
9.9 | 6.8 | |
4 days ago | 11 days ago | |
Python | JavaScript | |
Mozilla Public License 2.0 | MIT License |
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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.
user.js
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It's getting hard to use and recommend Firefox, I'm afraid for the free web
Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-respecting but still fairly usable browsers.
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In 2024, please switch to Firefox
For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.
[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
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Most secure and privacy oriented alternative to mail.app
For macOS : Thunderbird and you can harden it even more with this : https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
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Which Firefox user.js file do you recommend for piracy?
only arkenfox
- What privacy-related preferences keep breaking my Twitter?
- Anonimlik Rehberi
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Lock Down Firefox - Network Hardening - FOSS - git clone
This article is shit. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ is what you want.
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Waterfox G6.0.2 had whitelisted search deal partner www.bing.com against user extensions in extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains
If you make time to dig through settings and change them away from their official use (99% of users don't), then you should use a customized setup (in this case, a user.js). That way, you're good to go no matter what Firefox fork you use.
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Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime
Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...
[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/
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I don't understand what's so good about Firefox
Like others have said you can customize the browser to the point that it doesn't even look like the default anymore. Or customize it to maximize privacy.
What are some alternatives?
go-bouncer - A Go version of the redirector portion of bouncer.
Better-Fox - An up-to-date user.js to speed up and secure Firefox [Moved to: https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox]
gcp-ingestion - Documentation and implementation of telemetry ingestion on Google Cloud Platform
privacytools.io - 🛡🛠You are being watched. Protect your privacy against global mass surveillance.
standards-positions
Librefox - Librefox: Firefox with privacy enhancements
browser-laptop - [DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
settings
elinks - Fork of elinks
idm-trial-reset - Use IDM forever without cracking
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
bromite - Bromite is a Chromium fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!