From the ‘We’re Not Tracking You’ Files:
Mozilla has always been respectful of user privacy. But they also have to somehow get information from user’s browser to improve the product.
Since at least Firefox 7 with something called Telemetry, Mozilla has had an opt-in mechanism for monitoring the performance of the open source browser on user machines. Telemetry is opt-in.
Now Mozilla is going to the next level with something called the Firefox Health Report.
“We’ve designed Firefox Health Report to treat people well and to start the process of putting us back in control of the data that shapes our online experience,” Mitchell Baker blogged. “We’ve designed it to provide useful information to you about your experience. For example: is a particular add-on causing performance to degrade? Will starting a new Firefox profile help improve performance?”
The Health Report can be disabled too – for those of us paranoid types that are always worried about anytime our browsers send data anywhere…but Mozilla (as always) is committed to user privacy with this effort.
I suspect most users will not opt-out and Mozilla will soon have a massive amount of information on the Health of Firefox users. I’m personally really curious what they will find out…
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
