from Hacker News

Firefox Pioneer

by binaryanomaly on 7/6/18, 3:39 PM with 55 comments

• by some_account on 7/6/18, 6:03 PM

  I have all kinds of anti tracking installed in Firefox but I'm going to sign up for this.

  Why? Because I want Firefox to be the best browser. Mozilla is not Google and not Microsoft. They have a very different view on privacy and how they would like the internet to evolve.

• by sevensor on 7/6/18, 6:17 PM

  Isn't Shield the same system that pushed a marketing gimmick late last year? I'm still feeling sore about that fiasco. Not sore enough to stop using Firefox and switch to a worse-for-privacy alternative, but sore enough to be grumpy about signing up for their studies.

• by joombaga on 7/6/18, 5:35 PM

  > The data you submit is encrypted in Firefox and not decrypted until it is on a server that is not connected to the wider internet.

  Okay, stupid question: How does it get there? Sneakernet?

• by fwdpropaganda on 7/6/18, 5:21 PM

  Companies like this data to improve their products. As long as it's opt-in, we should have no ethical issue with it. Doesn't surprise me that Mozilla is dealing with this ethically. One of the few organizations I trust.

• by dmix on 7/7/18, 2:19 AM

  > The data you submit is encrypted in Firefox and not decrypted until it is on a server that is not connected to the wider internet.

  This is a good approach.

• by JadeNB on 7/6/18, 7:51 PM

  > Once you’ve opted in, you may be enrolled in additional studies without potentially annoying prompts.

  Ha. "Once you've opted in, you will not have explicit control over enrollment in future studies" is a less sunny way of saying this.

• by 8bitsrule on 7/7/18, 4:58 AM

  I see that this personal information, too, doesn't pay like what pioneers used to get paid ... in land, gold, animals.

  "if you meet the criteria."

  No. I don't.