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Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

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Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#71
I can do a quick summary of what's being proposed and why. I work in the JS team at Mozilla and deal directly with the problems caused by insufficient data. Please note that I'm speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole.

Tracking down regressions, crashes, and perf issues without good telemetry about how often it's happening and in what context. Issues that might have otherwise taken a few days to resolve with good info, become multi-week efforts at reproduction-of-the-issue with little information.

It simply boils down to the fact that we can't build a better browser without good information on how it's behaving in the wild.

That's the pain point anyway. Mozilla's general mission, however, makes it very difficult to collect detailed data - user privacy is paramount. So we have two major issues that conflict: the need to get better information about how the product is serving users, and the need for users to be secure in their browsing habits.

We also know from history that benevolent intent is not that significant. Organizations change, and intents change, and data that's collected now with good intent can be used with bad intent in the future. So we need to be careful about whatever compromise we choose, to ensure that a change of intent in the future doesn't compromise our original guarantees to the user.

This is a proposed compromise that is being floated. Don't collect URLs, but only top-level+1 domains (e.g. images.google.com), and associate information with that. That lets us know broadly what sites we are seeing problems on, hopefully without compromising the user's privacy too much. Also, the information associated with the site is performance data: the time spent by the longest garbage-collection, paint janks.

This is a difficult compromise to make, which is why I assume it took so long for Mozilla to come around to proposing this. These public outreaches are almost always the last stage of a length internal discussion on whether proposals fit within our mission or not.

I'm not directly involved in this proposal, but I personally think it's necessary, and strikes a reasonable balance between the privacy-for-users and actionable-information-for-developers requirements.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#72
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. If this is helping users, it should be easy to convince them to turn it on.

That's not how it works. Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is; and when it comes to anonymous usage statistics, "most users" is _exactly_ the group of people you want to be collecting them from; otherwise your results will be skewed heavily in favor of a small minority of power users.

Why would optimising for the power users be wrong though? In most cases if it's good enough for the power users who tend to break things more often than regular people it is perfect for the regular users.

Quite the opposite if the focus too much on the regular users they might get too much noise and never notice issues in the more complex features that only power users tend to use.

You want the heavy users of your product sending in reports not the average Joe because he is less likely to even notice a issue.

Higher level features are less likely to be covered by tests and more likely to break just because of their complexity however you wont have many average people using them.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#74

I can do a quick summary of what's being proposed and why. I work in the JS team at Mozilla and deal directly with the problems caused by insufficient data. Please note that I'm speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole. Tracking down regressions, crashes, and perf issues without good telemetry about how often it's happening and in what context. Issues that might have otherwise taken a few day…

Mozilla's crash reporter already has the option of submitting the URL.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#76
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is; and when it comes to anonymous usage statistics, "most users" is _exactly_ the group of people you want to be collecting them from; otherwise your results will be skewed heavily in favor of a small minority of power users.

> Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is These users will be installing Chrome, not Firefox.

I hope not. If that's true, then Firefox is in serious trouble. There aren't nearly enough power users and privacy enthusiasts around to make Firefox a significant player in the browser market all on their own.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#77
post #45
post #14

This is ridiculous. I use and recommend Firefox for pure ideological reasons, because frankly, Chrome/Chromium is miles ahead of them. If they start opt-out tracking using the same approach as Google I do not see any reason to use it nor install it for my friends and family. That's some data for you, Mozilla.

As you may have read in the feedback request, Mozilla is proposing to use differential privacy – differential is very different from tracking. For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy for instance.

My point is not the way you label gathering information from your users but rather that it is about implementing something Google proposed.

If the mechanism works, fine, but why should I use Firefox over Chromium then? Opt-out data collection is in violation to my core beliefs and what I believed to be Mozilla's principles.

Collecting data without asking the user about it is - to me - in violation to the very definition of privacy and calling some way to anonymise data (who guarantees that the cryptographic approach to this is not obsolete in a few years?) "differential privacy" is at the very least dishonest.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are only considering collecting "eTLD+1, e.g. facebook.com or google.co.uk" so this should almost certainly not be an issue.

My homepage is my self-hosted reader, at rss. .com :)

They should ensure statistics are submitted per domain, in a way nobody can know the users of .com are also using .com

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#79
post #64
post #21

I think it's worth approaching this with an open mind and giving Firefox at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty plain to see how such aggregate usage data would lead to a better product for everyone. How many people here use website/app analytics to improve products they work on?

It's pretty plain to see how such aggregate usage data would lead to a better product for everyone. No, it is not. Especially not for something such as a browser which is mostly transparent to the content.

Browser performance is very closely tied to specifics of the content. That's why optimizing for e.g. JS benchmarks doesn't always result in a browser that feels any faster.

Re: Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

#80
This doesn't matter. SimilarWeb, Jumpshot and other clickstream companies are already doing this, in an even more non-transparent manner by using browser extensions that track every URL you visit, and searches you do, let alone the domain. I say let Mozilla give them some competition!
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