Mozilla Clarifies on Data Collection: Firefox Labs to Not Require Telemetry or Studies in Future Updates
www.quippd.com
TL;DR: Mozilla has shifted from the forced telemetry introduced in Firefox 138 for Firefox Labs. Hours after I posted about the Labs change, Mozilla opened bug 1972647, which describes a change to Labs to allow it to be used when telemetry or studies are disabled.

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2320051

Starting in Firefox 138, Mozilla started gating Firefox Labs features behind data collection.

Mozilla had announced that some new Firefox features would be released via Firefox Labs.

It is now a few hours since I posted, and there is reason to celebrate – Mozilla is updating Firefox Labs to let people access features without needing to enable data collection.

  • slackness@lemmy.ml
    102·
    18 days ago

    I am happy they’re giving people a choice. On the other hand, the fact is, (privacy respecting) telemetry is the only way to make a program as complicated as a web browser better. Especially important when your competition is a giant data hoarder with orders of magnitude more users. And people will just not turn on opt-in telemetry.

      • slackness@lemmy.ml
        31·
        17 days ago

        The Netflix analogy does not make any sense in this context.

        they could always ask. Ask and then listen.

        Not nearly enough people turn on optional telemetry. I’ll bet you don’t always either.

      • Victor@lemmy.world
        1·
        17 days ago

        Must have been a misunderstanding. I merely said that it makes sense that you would want to collect usage data on potential new future features that are in development, to gather an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. I didn’t say that features should be arbitrarily gated. That would make no sense. 👍