gcp-ingestion
min
gcp-ingestion | min | |
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2 | 62 | |
73 | 7,594 | |
- | 1.5% | |
8.7 | 8.7 | |
10 days ago | 15 days ago | |
Java | JavaScript | |
Mozilla Public License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
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gcp-ingestion
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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.
min
- Min Browser – v1.31.1
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Looking for a stripped and bare browser that uses very little CPU/Memory (more details below!)
FWIW, I found https://minbrowser.org/ and it uses very little CPU/Memory, but it uses DuckDuckGo and I prefer to use Google as my search engine... Also I do not think it supports installation of extensions?...
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My thoughts about Opera One | Reviewing some other browsers on the way too
I tried Min, I found it both appealing and confusing at the same time. It has a minimalist design and it simply looks amazing, but it has a massive drawback: It is TOO MUCH minimalist, you get confused using it, also because it's very unintuitive to use at first. It's also one of the slowest I've ever seen (on Windows, idk about Mac), even without extensions (because yeah, even if it's Chromium-based, you can't download any extensions). I guess if dev's increase it's performances, add extension's compatibility, and make it less confusing, it would be a pretty good browser, but for now, it sleeps in my trashcan.
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Easiest way to install CachyOS with normal firefox
In the CachyOS installation itself you can select to install Firefox. I hope they leave that firefox fork behind and do something super-vitaminized with Min Browser. I think they could improve a lot making custom userscripts
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Just received this email. Never happened before. Seems to be legit. Am I right to be concerned?
Some browsers (such as Min Browser) don't have a status bar like Firefox or Chrome to preview the target (it can only be displayed in the context menu).
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What is this browser?
I know it is not but the browser reminded me https://minbrowser.org/
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Why is it so hard to change Chromium's UI?
You can use Min, Fluid or any browser with full screen mode to have the same effect.
- Simple and quick browsers?
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An elementary OS theme for Firefox
I love firefox, but the UI is to old, I like the Min Browser look
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Par pitié installez UBlock ou le navigateur Brave pour contrer les pubs sur Youtube
des navigateurs il y en a plein: min, puffin, otter, falkon, dot, privacy browser, orion, netsurf, maxthon (de mémoire il est douteux en termes de vie privée celui là), etc.
What are some alternatives?
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
nyxt - Nyxt - the hacker's browser.
brave-browser - Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.
firefox-csshacks - Collection of userstyles affecting the browser
go-bouncer - A Go version of the redirector portion of bouncer.
browsh - A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers
serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞
DownloadNet - 💾 DownloadNet - All content you browse online available offline. Search through the full-text of all pages in your browser history. ⭐️ Star to support our work!
bigquery-etl - Bigquery ETL
browser-base - Modern and feature-rich web browser base based on Electron
browser
auto-tab-discard - Use native tab discarding method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs