> To be clear, I know that the AI kill switch does not claim to disable telemetry or advertising.<p>Well, at least it's not the closing sentence.
Thankyou! that title was painful, I spent 20 seconds term rewriting it in my head..<p>* Firefox's AI Switch Is Off. Telemetry Isn't<p>* Firefox's AI Switch Is Off. Telemetry Isn't off [complete second clause]<p>* Firefox's Telemetry Isn't Off [remove negative clause]<p>* Firefox's Telemetry Is On [remove double negative]<p>----<p>Admittedly I didn't read past the first two paragraphs, but I assume it is a several hundred word repetition of its tautologous title.
It's somewhat cathartic to go through the settings and JS parts, using the source as a guide, and rip out/disable all the spyware, which you can do even without having to build the whole thing from source.<p>Since I do my content filtering at the proxy level, all I want is <i>just a browser </i>.
Just follow the money.
water is wet<p>the sky is blue
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There shouldn't be <i>any</i> telemetry in free software, end of. There are other ways to estimate the number of active users, e.g. through downloads and browser fingerprints.<p>Mozilla does not need more money than it already has. Ladybird has shown that you don't need a huge team to build a browser from scratch, so clearly Mozilla isn't spending all the money it gets from Google for development.
I don’t get this take. There’s good reasons to have telemetry in any software. Doesn’t really have to do with whether it’s free or not.<p>Of course, it’s also good to have the option to disable it.
Does Firefox sell this data? That would be bad and should be able to turn off.
But there's other uses for telemetry that can help free software.
<i>> There are other ways to estimate the number of active users</i><p>The point of telemetry is not to estimate the number of active users, and focusing on "telemetry" is the wrong bogeyman. Things like crash reports are telemetry, and are perfectly acceptable as long as the user remains in control over whether or not to send them. Software should respect user privacy and user control.