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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

#411

Post by yakult »

yakult wrote: post #407
NabenHarb wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if you actually read and understood the link, points #1, 4, 5 aren't a concern. Moreover, points #2, 3, and 6 apply to just about every piece of software used.

what percentage of FF users on the planet do you expect could read a paper on differential privacy and actually verify those points, while understanding all the ifs and gotchas, and be able to tell if any of the arguments are wrong? What percentage of that elite group would actually be willing to devote the time and energy, for free, for every one of the thousands of softwares they use?

...or you could just scrap the whole idea and not bother with it.

This is true for the user, too. If the only viable choices are 'verify claims at great cost and no gain every few months', or 'use some other privacy-respecting browser', I am going to recommend the second.

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

#412

Post by sp332 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #372
sp332 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're probably just underestimating how popular it is. Tagging activity tripled from 2012 to 2017. They had 10 million monthly active users in February when Firefox bought them.

Does Mozilla look at any of the other top add-ons and implement them natively in the browser? Why was Pocket so special?

http://www.planet-libre.org/?post_id=18514

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firefox-dev/B3jJq_kUuIQ/32zv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/388ryl/pocket_and_...

This is the best I can do not being involved and two years after the fact.

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

#413

Post by mirimir »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #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 day…

This is a horrible development. If Mozilla starts collecting this sort of data on an opt-out basis, it will put many users at risk. Seriously, WTF?

> 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.

Sure, there's no problem with images.google.com because it's generically innocuous. But what about pornhub.com for users in Saudi Arabia? Or some Japanese site that's essentially child porn for users in the US? The top-level+1 domain in many cases is totally incriminating.

> Also, the information associated with the site is performance data: the time spent by the longest garbage-collection, paint janks.

Maybe so. But it's collection of the top-level+1 domain that's the problem.

> 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.

Fine. But then, make it opt-in, to protect users.

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

#414

Post by pishpash »

comex wrote: post #397
pishpash wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many problems here: 1. You're proposing a mechanism for collecting data, and a strategy for extracting more data than you currently do. You have not figured out the type of data that you will finally need, only a set of things that you currently envision. Naturally, the data that you will collect in the future will be more than what you currently envision. There is built-in mission creep that is dangerous. 2. What yo…

> There used to be a time when beta software was a thing. Prompt the users to become testers for your beta software. Firefox already has opt-in telemetry, and Firefox already has a beta channel. It's unclear to me how it would help to tie telemetry to the beta channel; that would just make the existing problems (not enough data, and biased data) even worse, since there are probably far more users willing to share tel…

In context, that might mean if there has to be some opt-out situation then opt-out for the beta channel might be slightly more acceptable.

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

#415

Post by im3w1l »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #250
keithpeter wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is a difficult compromise to make" Then don't make the compromise. As others have expressed here the reason few people opt in to data collection may be because they have chosen to use a Web browser that does not mandate the collection of data. I'm assuming there will always be an opt out which I shall add to my list of things I have to do when installing Firefox.

> I'm assuming there will always be an opt out which I shall add to my list of things I have to do when installing Firefox. There will be. Sorry for the hassle :(

How can I recommend my friends to use Firefox when I know they wont remember to opt out?

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

#416

Post by im3w1l »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #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 day…

There are many very, very political people inside Mozilla. Some of them may even want to commit political violence. Political violence seems to be a problem that just grows and grows, so how can we be sure that it's not supported in Mozilla. These would be a very small minority of Mozilla of course, but the problem is that you don't know who it is. And it only takes a single extremist to betray your users. To get your users injured or even killed.

The same concern will of course apply to any other data harvesters, but that's for another thread

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

#417

Post by im3w1l »

Yoric wrote: post #226
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do_I_have_very_bad_medical_condition.com Wouldn't that still leak health information? Less overall, but if any is bad, this still isn't acceptable.

Sure, except that with differential privacy, say 5% of telemetry reports would be marked as visiting do_I_have_very_bad_medical_condition.com anyway – regardless of whether they actually did.

What if a person visits 10 domains all indicating the same thing?

5%^10. Very very unlikely. Sounds very similar to "guilty beyond all reasonable doubt".

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

#418

Post by mirimir »

yoasif_ wrote: post #405
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top-level domains are still betraying the user's privacy. Does it bug me that PornoTube is significantly laggier on Firefox than YouTube? Sure. Do I want Mozilla to know that I'm visiting it? Hell no.

They wouldn't know that you are visiting it, just that someone is visiting it.

How can they not know that I'm visiting it? I mean, the data is coming from my IP address. Sure, they may be dropping that data before storage. But what if it's intercepted?

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

#419

Post by stewbrew »

mintplant wrote: post #329
Vinnl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or get the data from a random sample of users. You don't need data from everyone. To my amateur ear, that actually sounds like a good compromise to lessen the blow somewhat more. You should suggest it to Mozilla :)

That's what's proposed here. I guess no one actually read the post...?

I added the second part about the random sample later to the comment when I moved the proposal already out of my short term memory. I hope they use the data from their initial study to test whether the opt-out group actually is different from the group they already get data from.

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

#420

Post by kxyvr »

I'll also contend this is a disturbing, terrible idea.

I design optimization algorithms and software professionally and the majority of that software is released open source. Now, does my software likely run terribly on some problems that my users give it? Absolutely. That probably costs me business because they get frustrated, give up, and go somewhere else. And, to combat that, I could absolutely engineering my libraries to send anonymized information about their problem structure back to my company. Certainly, it would help me improve my software and algorithms. I also view it as horribly unethical, a breach of my customers trust, and an unacceptable course of action. Look, I want my software to work well for everyone, but it's part of my job to figure out when things don't well and fix that beyond scraping information about my customers uses automatically.

I contend this is a terrible idea and very much would like Mozilla to abandon it.

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