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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #125
syshum wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>This is a difficult compromise to make, Sorry I do not accept this compromise. Mozilla seems to have lost its way of late. Sad to see a company that was at the fore front of Privacy, and Security abandon that in name of market share and performance. I would rather sacrifice performance for privacy, not the other way around. From EME, to the adoption of Browser Extensions as the only customization option, now this..…

I think the core disagreement here is not ideological per se, but on premises. I agree with the motivation of not collecting any data. That said, I don't feel that we have a choice but to compromise. If we don't build a better browser, then the other browsers will win by default, which means you lose all those privacy and security motivations anyway. This is not some gleeful romp down the yellow brick road of data co…

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by disconnected »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #125
syshum wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>This is a difficult compromise to make, Sorry I do not accept this compromise. Mozilla seems to have lost its way of late. Sad to see a company that was at the fore front of Privacy, and Security abandon that in name of market share and performance. I would rather sacrifice performance for privacy, not the other way around. From EME, to the adoption of Browser Extensions as the only customization option, now this..…

I think the core disagreement here is not ideological per se, but on premises. I agree with the motivation of not collecting any data. That said, I don't feel that we have a choice but to compromise. If we don't build a better browser, then the other browsers will win by default, which means you lose all those privacy and security motivations anyway. This is not some gleeful romp down the yellow brick road of data co…

Here's what's going to happen.

You people are going ahead with this idiotic plan - because that is what Mozilla does, asks for feedback and then proceeds to ignore feedback - and you will lose another 2% market share.

The reason is painfully obvious: You betrayed one of the core principles of Firefox, which is privacy. You pissed off a lot of people which will NEVER come back because you stabbed them in the face and spat in the wound.

You also gave Microsoft and Google a freebie. Now they have something else to throw back at you: your supposed "more private" Firefox phones home with your users' browsing history (not strictly true, but people don't dig that deep into the minutiae).

Hows that stopping them from winning by default? You basically just disqualified yourself...

Make this thing optional, otherwise you are dead meat. If you can't "win" without betraying your principles, it's time to either throw down the towel and give up or just be upfront and admit that you are going to go all in, users be damned.

That last option would actually probably gain you a few users.

Edit: spelling...

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

#283

Post by pacifika »

joegosse wrote: post #249
ThePhysicist wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within the new European GDPR framework, IP addresses are to be considered as personally identifiable information, so the concern is warranted. What's decisive when characterizing an information as identifiable or not is not the fact of being actually able to perform the de-anonymization of the information (e.g. via the ISP in case of an IP address), but the mere possibility of it. Legally though Firefox would be allo…

>Within the new European GDPR framework, IP addresses are to be considered as personally identifiable information,... My understanding is that many of these details are yet to be settled with GDPR. The case referenced above was not interpreted under GDPR, which has yet to take effect. The definitions of personally identifiable data data rather vague, and precedent has not been set. A quick search showed conflicting o…

GDPR was approved on 25th of may 2016 with the IP address defined as the poster above you specified is my understanding

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

#284

Post by yorwba »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #185
dannysu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the choice between opt-in vs opt-out of automatic behavior? If Mozilla wants perf data, collect it and then prompt the user "crash reporting" style. I would totally opt-in to prompts. Give it a threshold and ask, "This page seems to frequently perform less well on your computer, would you like to send us a report?"

Random sampling, basically. The value of random sampling is hard to overstate - it gives you a real picture of what's going on. A non-random sampling gives you a picture, but you have no way of confirming that the picture is a reflection of reality. Random sampling and privacy run into conflicts not just in the browser space, but everywhere else. For example, recently the Canadian government went through a period whe…

Under the "collect and prompt" scheme, you are still sampling randomly.

A random sample of users experiences perf issues, a random sample of users opts-in to the collection, you get a random-sample of data. (If you suggest they opt-in to continued collection, you might even get a continuous stream of samples from the same user.)

Yes, that data won't cover the people who don't have issues, but do you need to optimize for them? It also won't cover people who have issues but still don't opt-in, but do you think that is somehow correlated to the severity of the issue? Otherwise the data will be mostly unbiased. The variance will be higher than if you made it opt-out, but if you are doing sound statistics, you will have to handle that anyway.

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

#285

Post by SubiculumCode »

froydnj wrote: post #182
dhimes wrote: post #118

I generally trust Mozilla, but I really don't understand what they are going to get out of the data. Their explanation leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps it's simply because I don't work on browsers? How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't. And- ditto for "Jank" (not sure I understand that term, frankly- why is it capitalized?). So…

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.) "Jank" is our internal term for slow, non-responsive interaction with the browser (the capitalization of it in the original message is a little peculiar). If you click your mouse button, and then a second or more later, the item that you were clicking on the screen responds? That's jank. That input form that's not keeping up with your typing? That's jank. And so on. We can (and do) c…

Spending resources optimizing Firefox for how sites implement their JS seems over the top. The heaviest sites tend to be the most mainstream anyway, imo, and those are easy to pick out.

I am a Mozilla supporter for more than a decade, but this is the wrong move.

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

#286

Post by devotedtoneu »

FlyingLawnmower wrote: post #260

I am surprised that there is such a fundamental misunderstanding of differential privacy on the Hacker News crowd. Meeting the standard of true differential privacy is one of the strongest known unconditional privacy guarantees. It will prevent Mozilla from being able to answer any user specific questions. For example, they might have an accurate count of how many people visit Google.com (say 60% of their user base),…

I'm surprised at how difficult it is for certain posters in this thread to recognize the following about our behavior and device usage:

More Data Collection < Less Data Collection

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

#287

Post by 0134340 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #263
xaldir wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not whether this method is "sufficiently anonymous", the point is: I don't want my browser to collect any kind of data.

Why? No, seriously; why? I don't get this mentality at all. Let's ignore the exact implementation here for a moment, and assume that Firefox is somehow magically doing this data collection in such a way that it is guaranteed the data collected cannot be traced back to you as an individual. (E.g. "sufficiently anonymous".) What problem do you have with that, specifically? How does this harm you in any way?

If it's through "secure" code, you can't always guarantee it in the future nor what Mozilla does with this data in the future. Also it doesn't set a good precedent to proceed in this direction of opt-out behavior in Firefox.

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

#288

Post by Vinnl »

fenwick67 wrote: post #66
Vinnl wrote: post #13

Note: "planning" means "reaching out for feedback about". Also interesting: the method they plan on using for anonymising this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Principle... If that is not sufficiently anonymous, then please submit the reasoning why to Mozilla.

This is like saying "diffie hellman key exchange has no flaws, therefore https implementations are perfectly secure".

I'm not saying anything has no flaws, just that if it has, it would be nice if you would inform Mozilla about them.

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

#289

Post by gbuk2013 »

0134340 wrote: post #273
gbuk2013 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be happy to do so, once consumers and content creators (and specifically the companies they sell rights to) are on a level playing field in terms of legal protections and lobbying powers.

This isn't about the money or power you or I have. This is about freedom to distribute content and the agreement between the user and the creator while you're asking the browser to be the ideological arbiter of this transaction. If you're all for freedom, you should logically see that not including the DRM option is inhibitive of both the user's and the creator's freedoms. As a browser, it should be ideologically agn…

I don't buy that argument, sorry. Because it requires something as anti-freedom as DRM to exist in the first place.

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

#290

Post by gbuk2013 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #269
gbuk2013 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla fought DRM until the very end and lost. If Firefox is to have any chance at remaining a mainstream browser it needs to support Netflix and the likes. You can't seriously blame them for this, because they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Yes I can, and I will, because they sold out. They sold out their principles for the sake of market share. (And looking at their marked share, fat lot of good…

> Yes I can, and I will, because they sold out Excuse me, but did you support Mozilla with time/money? > They sold out their principles for the sake of market share. 12% is still better than 1%, and the thing that mostly changed the landscape was the fact that mobile Internet heavily disfavors Mozilla (e.g. Android ships with Chrome, iPhone with Safari), and Google has a heavy advantage when it comes to advertising a…

> Excuse me, but did you support Mozilla with time/money?

Yes, I have done. Thank you for the snark.

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