Mozilla have a Google Analytics Premium account and they try to minimize the information they share [1].<p><pre><code> Our Google Analytics premium account is set to opt-out on all of 3rd party
uses of the data and the only people who have access to the anonymous
aggregated data is Mozilla Employees. This is not the normal Google
Analytics setup that most people use on other websites.
Also, to increase privacy we flipped the anonymize flag in the Google
Analytics request...
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8</a>
And they also include JavaScript from <a href="https://ethn.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ethn.io/</a>, the relative privacy value of which you can judge for yourself, and whose parent company, I note in the footer, was bought by Facebook...
When you open a freshly installed Firefox on Ubuntu or Windows (that is where I checked) you will have a google cookie set right before the first usage, without any chance of opting out or being asked before.<p>Yes, anybody can change the startpage, delete all cookies and restart the browser. How many users will do this? And does forcing every user into google surveillance comply with this privacy marketing of mozilla, or is it just a zynical fake campaign?<p>There should be a startpage explaining what cookies are, describing the difference between temporary and permanent cookies and how these help to track your web usage, and provide one single, visible button to delete all cookies.<p>After this I should be asked if I would like to help mozilla funding by redirecting me to a google web search which will set a permanent cookie.
I've had GA's domains redirected to 0.0.0.0 in HOSTS ever since I knew of them.<p>It's also another one of these single-page-apps that require JavaScript to display any content at all.<p>I think with such a design they're clearly not targeting the sort of privacy levels that more users on HN than the Internet in general expect.
Mozilla tried to launch a site to help educate people while tracking engagement?<p>This seems like a much bigger issue than the NSA copying entire datastreams from American internet hubs.
The website is totally broken for me: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/y01g1NG.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/y01g1NG.png</a>
This is completely inacceptable.<p>Preaching water and drinking wine, eh?<p>If they’d really want some kind of tracking, they could have used a locally installed system like piwik, as the largest issue with tracking comes when the data from many sites is combined.
Not only enabled, but in breach of the Google Analytics' Terms which state very clearly: <i>"You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data. "</i><p>See section 7 "Privacy" here for the full text. <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html</a>
one of the prime reasons gnu forked firefox for icecat was google safebrowsing , besides that i dont think firefox really doesnt give a shit about your privacy and shit like that .
their primary concern is to ship software , not code quality or issues of relevance to users .if the illusion can be maintained that it does care about your privacy then it works fine for them , it works fine for their major "donors".
Next time you go to a movie theatre and there's someone standing there keeping count of how many people are going in - because it's there job or something - make sure to complain they're infringing on your right to privacy.