The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.

But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”

You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.

As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.