gcp-ingestion
positron
gcp-ingestion | positron | |
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2 | 17 | |
73 | 529 | |
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8.7 | 0.0 | |
10 days ago | almost 6 years ago | |
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Mozilla Public License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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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.
positron
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Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting
Mozilla used to work on it: https://github.com/mozilla/positron
Currently I'm guessing https://tauri.app/ would be the easiest way to get away from electron.
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One meme from my collection
They made an Electron-compatible replacement, Positron, discontinued.
- Firefox should have a webview
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What if Discord changed their Desktop app to use Firefox browsing engine instead of chromium?
Replacing Electron and rebuilding Discord from the ground-up would be quite the undertaking. What framework would you use? Firefox has tried to make an Electron-like framework in the past with Positron, but it has since been discontinued.
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Is there a way to build desktop apps using Firefox engine?
Mozilla Positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
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How do you think Mozilla can better optimize Firefox (and Gecko)?
That way: * other browsers can base their engine on Firefox's * it's possible to make nodejs applications based on Gecko rather than Blink (i think it was called Positron) * other company can join and help them having an engine that is truely free and open source, where everybody can contribute and assure that the web standard is respected
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Chad Spotify
Yeah, totally. Mozilla started something that would do just that, but it looks like it's been abandoned for a while. https://github.com/mozilla/positron Not sure if anyone's made a fork that's being maintained.
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day 1 : so far so good
Itβs been discontinued github/mozilla/positron
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Created a comparison table (Firefox vs. the big three): feedback?
Firefox has project seperated from it's browser, just the problem is it never took off and only stay as... a relic of the past https://github.com/mozilla/positron
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Chrome says nom-nom
They did, twice. But they both were really unused.
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
firedragon-browser - A Floorp fork with custom branding π (mirrored from GitLab)
brave-browser - Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.
go-bouncer - A Go version of the redirector portion of bouncer.
qbrt - CLI to a Gecko desktop app runtime
serenity - The Serenity Operating System π
ungoogled-chromium - Google Chromium, sans integration with Google
bigquery-etl - Bigquery ETL
FirefoxPWA - A tool to install, manage and use Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in Mozilla Firefox [Moved to: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox]
browser
youtube-music - YouTube Music Desktop App bundled with custom plugins (and built-in ad blocker / downloader)