Taking a look at r/all one day, after many years of only seeing carefully-chosen subs that were actually good, was definitely one of the things that got me to finally quit.
If it was an app developer who precipitated it, so what? It had to be someone. That does not invalidate the choice of everyone else who participated in it. If you're going to hold an unpopular opinion, it should be a better one.
Speaking of large numbers of user comments, I was just reading the hacker news discussion. Whatever you think of that site, it's full of the sort of people who used to be the core of the Firefox user base. People who would help their friends and family get it installed. Web developers who made sure their site works with more than one browser engine. People who know enough to be offended by changes like this one. People who Mozilla needs to reach if it wants to have a future in the web browser market.
Comments elsewhere are similarly negative. I encourage everyone who cares about Firefox to turn off all the telemetry, or perhaps even consider moving to one of the forks such as Librewolf. If they notice enough of a drop in incoming data collection after this latest move, perhaps there's still a chance that Mozilla will get the message that they need to change course before it's too late.
The data being collected is meant to enhance the appeal of Firefox as an ad platform for customers who might want to buy paid placements in Firefox Suggest. Perhaps they also consider it useful as a trial balloon to test the reaction it gets before heading further in that direction. The reaction it gets will not be good.
Canonical apparently turned on enabled-by-default telemetry for new installs in 2018 which records basic system hardware stats and such. It's not that much compared to what Firefox sends, but adding it still did damage to their reputation.
Another thing Ubuntu has in common with Firefox is a continuing long-term decline in market share. As they do things like adding telemetry, flirting with the idea of putting advertising in the package manager, insisting that everyone use snap, et cetera, users have started to go elsewhere. As I did.
In the case of Ubuntu though, the company's main business is in serving their corporate customers. If it's little-used by the rest of us the company might still do well, as I hope they continue to do. Firefox does not share that advantage.
Ubuntu telemetry is fairly minimal, as of last time I used it a few years ago. Not remotely comparable to what firefox does. They just want to know what hardware you have, there's no user behaviour tracking, and it's fully opt-in (you have to deliberately turn it on when installing). KDE and Gnome have a little something like that as well now, I think. Almost everything else does not.
Debian has a list (last updated 2023-10) of software among the 97000 packages they distribute which have been found to violate user privacy by "phoning home" for telemetry or other purposes:
gnome-calculator - fetches currencies
Firefox - multiple issues
Thunderbird - opt-out telemetry that is not yet patched for Debian
Chromium - phones home in various ways
syncthing - version check and lots more
cura - phones home in various ways, patched out in Debian
azure-cli - collects "anonymous" telemetry by default
glances - connects to several online services to discover public IP
webext-bulk-media-downloader - loads the website and sends version info
Golang - planning on implementing enabled-by-default telemetry
Never mind the controversy about telemetry in general, which I suppose has its uses even if it's too often over-used. This telemetry in particular — collecting data about how many times you searched for things involving shopping, travel, real estate — is ridiculous, and cannot be justified by vague platitudes about enhancing the browsing experience.
Mozilla and Microsoft have much in common when it comes to telemetry, in that they are both leaders in collecting quite a lot of it and they both spend a great deal of time and effort to analyze all that data so as to improve the user experience.
I hadn't really considered the advertising angle, but now that you mention it I'm sure advertisers would also find all this thoroughly privacy-respecting anonymized data to be of interest when they're considering the idea of paying for promotion through Firefox Suggest. Mitchell Baker may no longer be in charge of it, but there must still be some highly placed people over there who are fully on board with her vision of turning Firefox into a better advertising platform.
