InformAction Forums

First off I'm a happy NS user, couldn't imagine life without it.

Having said that and this may be a stupid question, but:

I've heard that chromium connects to google on its own even when every function requiring that is turned off - even though it's free software. This is another reason why I wouln't use chromium.

So my question is does FF show any signs of doing something like this (or anything else related to tracking the user by Mozilla corp) or is it completely safe from a tracking perspective? I know I'm a bit paranoid, sorry.

get Ghostery

Thanks for the reply. Sorry, maybe it was unclear, but I want to know about tracking by Mozilla specifically.

Maybe there is none, I don't know.

Ghostery AFAIK is for tracking by websites.

I'm pretty sure that Firefox doesn't do tracking for the sake of tracking. It does auto-update by default, but that should be all.

Guardian would know better, though.

Possibly, but none of it is intended to be malicious by Mozilla. I'll list a few things (apart from checking for updates), you'll have to judge their impact on your privacy for yourself.

1) If you use the default home page (about:home), every time upon opening, it pings their server at snippets.mozilla.com with your browser, language, Operating System and some misc info. Then they provide you with "relevant snippets" about Fx for Android, "Firefox Flicks" and similar crap.

2) During regular browsing, while "Block reported attack sites" and "web forgeries" are enabled, Fx will ask Google's servers to check if the website you are visiting is malicious. If it is, you'll get the blocked page. This option is of course used for your own protection. Firefox defaults to sending several "fake" requests together with the real one to make tracking of you harder to Google, at least they did so when I last checked (Fx 3.6). Fx also has a database where it stores that info for a limited time during which it doesn't have to ask Google.

3) Unless you disable Crash reporting, whenever Firefox crashes it will submit a crash report to Mozilla. These crash reports may unintentionally contain some private or sensitive information, though such occurrences should be rare. They are mostly technical, you can check yours in about:crashes.

Realistically, they already get most of the info from (1) whenever add-ons are updated, you check for updates etc. I've only blocked snippets.mozilla.com because, in my own opinion, they don't need to be pinged every time I open the page. Nor do I want their "relevant snippets".
(2) is used to protect you from websites that have been hacked. It happens, and it may happen to a website you have white-listed in NoScript.
(3) helps make Firefox better. Whatever that means... :p

There are "tracking" in the sense of aggregate statistics of how many are downloading it, using it and what versions and what countries but nothing specifically tied to the users. Now if you use Fx Sync, then by all means yes it will know when, where, how often as it needs that information to sync your stuff properly. I personally use Dragon which is a version of the Open Source Chromium build that takes a lot of the none sense out of the browser (Chrome which is a Google centric, greedy build from the source code of Chromium) but if you use their sync feature, still you are connecting to the Google accounts and the same as Fx happens, but on its own, no it actually does not track. However, it does monitor the "awesomebar" which is what Fx has been doing for a long while as well, so nothing new there. Just disable prediction and you are good to go.

Appreciate the replies, thanks!