• Mas@jlai.lu
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    2 days ago

    No it’s false, TorBrowsers, Librewolf and IronFox doesn’t contains telemetry.

    Just because some browsers are forks doesn’t mean they contain telemetry.

    The code is open-source, so anyone can see it by taking a look.

      • ken@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        The screenshot in the post is from IronFox.

        It’s not, though? Let me guess, it’s from some tool or page doing static analysis on the APK and reporting results? Please include a link or reference to actual source when reporting in the future.

        So, Firefox contains a library that can be used for reporting telemetry to Mozilla. When you download Firefox from Mozilla, this is enabled and pointing to Mozilla servers. After reading Privacy Notice shouldn’t be a surprise.

        When you install one of the fork that disables telemetry (IronFox, LibreWolf, Konform Browser at least do it this way), they will configure the build such that the endpoints are never called. Mozilla are actually reasonable enough that this is supported, documented, and reasonably straightforward for those bothering to build FF from source.

        So yes, when you download IronFox it contains a library that could be used for Mozilla Telemetry. It’s just that it’s never used to do so (assuming no bugs).

        Why not rip it out completely? Because completely ripping it out is more work, has its own risk of introducing bugs, and could introduce more work for maintainer with patching ~whenever they pull updates from Mozilla - increasing the time users have to wait for getting the monthly security fixes for their fork.