A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Easily? How?
AFAIK no matter what you do, firefox still calls home sometimes.
From what I can tell, the idea is to make you feel like, with a little bit of effort, the privacy thing would be achievable,
but when you actually try, it’s a whole different ordeal.
In the settings you can disable telemetry. It’s very self explanatory. Also I think firefox may call home to check if you have telemetry enabled. But that isn’t a big deal. Can you be more specific on what actual data you see Firefox still sending home and exactly what the problem is?
How would I check exactly what data firefox is sending home?
firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net
There are unexpected connections to these two domains that cannot be disabled using firefox options.
You would have to use wireshark or some other software to look at the actual data being sent. I’m not 100% sure. Likely the first one is just checking to see if you have telemetry enabled or something. Like I said, you can’t just assume all of your data is being sent because it’s phoning Firefox domains. You need to pick apart the traffic. It could literally just be sending (user has telemetry disabled) and that’s it. You don’t know. Firefox is open source. If it was sending massive amounts of user info despite telemetry heing turned off then it would be fucking obvious and you’d hear about it everywhere. You could try posting in a firefox community and asking if anyone knows. I’d be interested too
Honestly I don’t think I’m technically adept enough to check this myself. I was following firefox privacy guides, and the (much more competent) people writing them were puzzled about those two.
Of course it’s not necessarily malicious, but it has became hard to be trusting.
In the end I kind of just gave up on privacy, I take mitigation measures as a symbolic gesture, but still assume someone’s watching over my shoulder whatever I do online. Not a good feeling to be honest.
Sorry for linking to a Reddit thread, but looks like at least the first domain you listed is for checking blocklists and extensions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/fwc2sf/shavarservicesmozilla_and/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Admin
None of these seem suspicious or privacy-invasive. Like I said, the browser is doing a bunch of shit in the background. You have to actually look at the traffic being sent.
Believe me, i’m the same way. If I see an app sending out domain requests, I get automatically sketched out. But if you take a step back, and really try to research what these domains are for, you’ll see that most (not all of them) are just normal data that you need for the software to function.
Can you send me the link where people were trying to figure those 2 out?
EDIT: Nvm I found what these are.