In Firefox, the Telemetry system collects various measures of Firefox performance, hardware, usage and customizations and submits it to Mozilla. The Telemetry data collected by a single client can be examined from the integrated about:telemetry browser page, while the aggregated reports across entire user populations are publicly available at telemetry.mozilla.org.
Firefox now shows what telemetry data it’s collecting about you
The histograms on the about:telemetry page only show the non-empty buckets in a histogram, except for the bucket to the left of the first non-empty bucket and the bucket to the right of the last non-empty bucket.
Telemetry blocking:1) Type: toolkit.telemetry.unified set to FALSE2) Type: toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled set to FALSE3) Type: toolkit.telemetry.enabled set to FALSE4) Type: datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled set to FALSE5) Type: datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled.v2 set to FALSE (Pre v50 firefox)6) Type: datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled set to FALSE
Interaction data: Firefox sends data about your interactions with Firefox to us (such as number of open tabs and windows; number of webpages visited; number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons; and session length) and Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners (such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals).
Technical data: Firefox sends data about your Firefox version and language; device operating system and hardware configuration; memory, basic information about crashes and errors; outcome of automated processes like updates, safebrowsing, and activation to us. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs.
You can perform searches directly from several places in Firefox, including the Awesome Bar, Search Bar, or on a New Tab. We receive data about how you engage with search in Firefox and the number of searches you request from our search partners.
Technical & Interaction data: Firefox sends us data such as the position, size and placement of content we suggest, as well as basic data about your interactions with content. This includes the number of times content is displayed or clicked.
Mozilla and Pocket receive aggregated data about the recommendations you see and click. We also share aggregated data about the sponsored content you see and click with our third-party ad platform Adzerk so advertisers can see how many people click on their articles. This aggregated data does not identify you personally.
Webpage and technical data to Certificate Authorities: When you visit a secure website (usually identified with a URL starting with "HTTPS"), Firefox validates the website's certificate. This may involve Firefox sending certain information about the website to the Certificate Authority identified by that website. Opting out increases the risk of your private information being intercepted. Learn more.
Technical & interaction data: Firefox sends Mozilla data such as the number of times Firefox suggests or displays content and your clicks on that content, as well as basic data about your interactions with Firefox Suggest. Mozilla shares information with our partners about how many times suggestions are shown and clicked for verification and feature improvement.
Technical and Interaction data: If you enable sync, Firefox will periodically send basic information using Telemetry about the most recent attempt to sync your data, such as when it took place, whether it succeeded or failed, and what type of device is attempting to sync. You can also read the documentation.
Interaction data: We receive aggregate data about visits to the AMO website and the Add-ons Manager in Firefox, as well as interactions with content on those pages. Read about data practices on Mozilla websites.
A Firefox engineer told ZDNet the page was primarily created for selfish reasons, in order to help engineers debug Firefox test installs. However, it was allowed to ship to the stable branch also as a PR move, to put users' minds at ease about what type of data the browser maker collects from its users.
However, if users are still uncomfortable with allowing Mozilla to collect even the most basic details about their browser install, they can disable Firefox's telemetry feature from the browser's settings section, at about:preferences#privacy in the "Firefox Data Collection and Use" section
The release channel of Firefox that hundreds of millions of people use sends us Category 1 and 2 technical and interaction data by default. The latter is especially useful so that we can understand how people interact with menus, prompts, features, and core browser functions. Because this telemetry data is limited, it is not enough to make fully informed decisions about product changes.
Mozilla engineers recently starting shipping stable releases of Firefox with a hidden page that details the telemetry metrics used for debugging Firefox test installs. This move ties into its push for an increase in privacy controls and transparency in how the company handles your data.
Firefox 75 comes with a new telemetry agent that sends information about your operating system and your default browser to Firefox every day. This guide will walk you through disabling this "feature" to protect your privacy.
For some time, Firefox has been collecting telemetry data about how you use the browser, such as the number of web pages you visit, safebrowsing information, the number of open tabs and windows, what add-ons are installed, and more.
Once the information is gathered, the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\pingsender.exe program will be executed to upload the data to Firefox's telemetry servers at -browser-agent/1/default-browser/[UID].
2) Data that are polled for every time the browser is idle for more than a minute. In Taras' experience, data are gathered a couple times an hour. Currently we poll various about:memory fields. Other things to poll for: number of open tabs, sizes of key sqlite databases, sizes of cache, etc.
Required Action:To minimize fingerprinting risk, it is crucial to ensure that arbitrary web sites absolutely cannot access the telemetry data while it's stored on the client. Additionally, the data should be transmitted from the Client Component to the Server Component over a secured (and preferably authenticated) channel; this means SSL/HTTPS must be used. Any data that is no longer needed should be erased from our servers, and a unique ID used for duplicate elimination should be short-lived.
Some measurements need to be persisted to disk because they are only available during shutdown (e.g., measuring how long it takes to shut down plugins). Any measurements taken between ping and shutdown are persisted to disk upon application shutdown. Telemetry ping code checks for stored data when sending it to the server, then after successfully sending it the data is erased and the telemetry "state" is reset. From Bug 707320 comment 2:
Required Action: It should be clear in the UI what we collect and how we collect it. For example, Test Pilot asks the user to approve not only data collection but also data submission, providing information about what's being collected or submitted at the time it begins. Telemetry should do something similar to make it very explicit what is being collected as well as when it's being submitted.
It is not about keeping firefox up-to-date, because when I manually start the search for an update, Firefox establish a new connection: Mozilla REALLY want my browser to SEND datas to Amazon, which is one of the worst company when we talk about collecting personnal informations, just like Google, which Firefox also use, but it's less dramatic since I can decide to not use that feature.
We have shared exclusive tutorials in past to disable telemetry and data collection in operating systems such as Windows 7/8/8.1 and Windows 10. We have also shared tips to improve privacy in Microsoft Office suite and Opera web browser.
To make the user experience better, Firefox collects info about crash reports and other technical and interaction data as is commonly done by most apps. But apart from that the browser also collects info about the operating system, display resolution, etc. Firefox uses unique identifiers in its installer to understand how many people are downloading the installer and how many people are actually installing it. Firefox uses all this data to recommend personalized extensions to users.
There are no claims about Firefox using the data in the wrong way. Having said that, ideally, Firefox should let users know about this during the setup process itself. Also, the feature should be disabled by default and if not, then that should be conveyed to the user as well.
Firefox continually collects anonymous data about how you use the browser. It then sends that data to its servers, to improve features in the browser. Don't worry, this isn't compromising your privacy, but it does make Firefox slower.
With ResearchKit, you choose which studies you want to join, and you control the information you provide to individual research apps. Apps using ResearchKit or CareKit can pull data from the Health app only with your consent. Any apps built using ResearchKit for health-related human subject research must obtain consent from the participants and must provide information about confidentiality rights and the sharing and handling of data.
With the California Consumer Privacy Act(CCPA), Mozilla for the first time to offer a setting to users in Firefox 72 (which is scheduled to release on January 7, 2020) to request the company to delete their telemetry data.
Microsoft Teams, like Skype for Business, collects three types of data about the app: what it calls census data, usage data, and error reporting data. So-called census data includes information about your device, operating system and user language, as well as generating a specific user ID that is hashed (or protected) twice, in order to not link it to a certain individual. 2ff7e9595c
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