Hi bernie4, Allow me to offer this: I uninstalled Chrome 5 years ago because it had 5 updaters and 2 update managers. I heard that they streamlined it to 3 updaters and 2 update managers.

For a BROWSER ???

Firefox has one updater.

Hi bernie4, Firefox records and uploads some "telemetry" information that is used to assess feature usage and watch for problems. If you like, you can completely opt out (if you haven't already). More info in this article: Telemetry collection and deletion.

Thanks Guys. I thought I knew about Telemetry. The update service for Chrome is not an issue for me. As a general rule, like most open source projects, there will be a fair number of Google, Microsoft, Oracle etc employees who are part of the team. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Companies or individuals are quite entitled to have an input, it is open source after all.

However, I do understand that something like a web browser used to generate money (adds, sale of data, (with or without permission), user preferences data) have different priorities to what the community at large expects from web browsers.

Generally Chrome has followed innovations made by Mozilla and Mozilla has followed innovations made by Chrome.

This is entirely appropriate. The only caveat I would put on this for Mozilla is they tell their users.

So the question still remains does Firefox collect any "profile" information on websites (apart from cookies & history ) and if they do is it being disguised as Telemetry data? From the article linked above .....as well as Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals....... The worrying part of this is the bit is ...........or our partners such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals........

That seems to suggest what I thought was Telemetry is really data about search engine interactions.

Isn't the result of "search engine interactions" the very data that google is using for their data mining for advertising preferences etc?.

So if I turn off Telemetry, none of this will be sent. So where can I find this information to delete it?

Please refer to the page I linked before.

Please refer to the page I linked before.

Thank you for your reply. I did go to the link you provided and it told me what Mozilla did with the data and how to delete that data. It holds that data for 13 months unless I delete it, in which case it will delete it within 30 days.

BUT that is at the Mozilla server end.

I do understand that If I opt out of Telemetry data, it will not be sent to Mozilla, and so the data already at Mozilla will be deleted within 30 days.

I am only concerned what happens on my end.

But does Firefox actually collect Telemetry data and just not send it? If so how long does that data persist on my machine (session?, fixed time?, forever?) and where is it located?

I see two folders in the profile folder that look related to collecting data.

• datareporting
• saved-telemetry-pings

Thank you cor-el that is the sort of thing I am looking for.

It seems Firefox DOES collect Telemetry data whether you have it turned off or not. It does not transmit it to Mozilla but IT DOES STORE AND ARCHIVE IT.

What for? Do they hope I will turn on Telemetry and then they can send it all?

I wonder why this isn't seen as a privacy or security issue? All that would be needed is an add on to exploit this data.

There is this age old practice by Unix/Linux administrators and programmers to always rename files they replace. You end up with whole groups of files with .old appended to their name (just in case we need them) and sometimes even directories.

We end up with whole structures of directories that are absolutely redundant as new ways or methods of doing the same thing.

I do appreciate the huge effort that goes into open source programs and the fact that many people work on only specialized areas and almost no one has control over the whole basic structure.

Perhaps a project to remove redundant code and directories or just to eliminate the storage of data after a successful session. Same goes for the redundant parameters in the config files.

bernie4 said

All that would be needed is an add on to exploit this data.

Extensions cannot randomly access data on disk. If an add-on asked you to navigate it to your telemetry folder so it could access those files would you do that?

Thank you for your reply. Of course I would not, (but a less technical person may well). I would ask a question of you in return. When you install an app on your phone and it asks for permissions, do you give them? Same thing. Why would you not?

That is beside the point however.

Firefox DOES collect such data despite my specific expectations that it does not.

Firefox DOES NOT send it to Mozilla unless I allow it.

Firefox STORES this data in an Archive and that is again at odds with my expectations.

The options regarding this DO NOT in fact in any way lead me to the expectation that this data would be collected and stored locally, on the contrary most normal people would say what Firefox is doing is hair splitting.

Just like Chrome

It is unclear whether this data would be sent to Mozilla should sometime in the future the Telemetry permission was changed (by an update?)

You can disable the Archiving of data by changing the preference toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled to False

Thank you for your reply RobertJ. Hopefully that does the trick

See also the docs:

• https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/toolkit/components/telemetry/docs/internals/preferences.rst

Thank you for your reply cor-el. I am amazed that people haven't objected to Telemetry before. I can truly understand why Mozilla developers would want Telemetry. A tool which is able to provide statistical information would be invaluable at pointing to bugs. My objection, however is about choice. If I turn off Telemetry then I don't want to have my Firefox do anything about collecting information for Telemetry. I don't want to collect it then discard it. To get around this control we have another control called archive the Telemetry which just stores it locally so it can be sent later. After all a future update may temporarily turn on Telemetry, even if its only while it updates. Its is so Google and Microsoft. Then there are pings. It doesn't send any information only that Firefox has started or ended or run first time etc. It is a really good way to time things so developers can make sure results of their changes are as they expected. Hmm...pretty harmless. I just snoop on a network and look for those pings. I can automate it and work out when that particular IP pings Mozilla. That tells me when that particular Firefox was started and finished and that the owner is on a PC or MAC so that probably says when the computer is occupied. Paranoid? probably, but read the Facebook & Google Privacy policies and if that doesn't scare you about your security/privacy then you are very naive.

By the way here is a shout out to all the moderators of these pages. You do a top job dealing with people like me.

I would like to see the support pages remove the answers metric so we don't get answers for the sake of answers, rather than solutions.