Hi @GaelDuval,
I was pretty disappointed when I read your retweet this morning: https://mobile.twitter.com/gael_duval/status/1222072347076841472
I thought that, after your experience of living and working through the onslaught of FUD-spreading that Microsoft did against the FLOSS community in the 90s/00s, that you would know that this approach isn’t going to get us anywhere. And you expressed similar in a thread recently: Long-term plan for /e/ official app store
Why, why, why, are so many FLOSS enthusiasts so against Mozilla? The most successful FLOSS company, which truly embodies the FLOSS spirit by doing its development in the open, producing proper copyleft code and collaborating with the community. The company that did more than any other to keep the web open, which fought back against Microsoft’s FUD against open-source and broke their monopoly on web browsers as well as fighting to ensure that the web follows open standards*. Mozilla has done more than any other browser vendor (except TOR, if we consider that project a “vendor”) to improve our online privacy and protect us.
That article you retweeted is basically saying “Look, Mozilla says this is white but we believe it is black” with nothing to back up their claims other than their personal opinion. Mozilla are totally open about what data they are collecting (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/) and if we don’t believe them we can check the source code. Open Firefox and go to “about:telemetry” and we can see everything which that so-called news site says is “personal” data. Did you check? Did you find anything which you consider to be personal data? Even when aggregated, does any of that tell anybody anything about you?
You may refer to the fact that the data travels with an IP address. But Mozilla explain that the IP address is removed as soon as it arrives at the server, so the two are no longer connected. And if you don’t believe them you can check the source code for this, as far as I know. Heck, every website we visit knows the IP address we send our requests from, so unless we all use TOR or a VPN then we’ve all got much bigger things to worry about.
And this LeanPlum thing, that’s definitely FUD. The Mozilla support explanations state exactly what data is sent to LeanPlum, but then the author of that FUD-article then refers to the LeanPlum privacy policy to suggest that personal data is sent to them - it isn’t at all, the only data which is sent is what is listed here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-you-use-leanplum-firefox. Again, if we don’t believe then we can check the source code.
Still, I am open to being convinced that Mozilla really are the evil spying empire that so many FLOSS and privacy fundamentalists say they are - if these fundamentalists provide compelling evidence. I will read the future installments of that website’s investigation (if they ever appear).
Alors, c’est l’heure de dejeuner donc je vais arreter. Bon appetit
*Note that /e/ is undermining this work by using Bromium… because it’s based on Blink which is Google’s browser engine which it uses to do exactly the same as Microsoft was trying to do 15 years ago. The fact that Blink is “open source” is a thin veneer of respectability that so many people (including /e/, it appears) seem to be dazzled by, at the same time as saying that Mozilla are untrustworthy. The hypocrisy stinks.