Comments on: Mozilla Websites, Web Analytics and Privacy

By: Nicholas Shiell

Nicholas Shiell — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:52:31 +0000

I DO like Mozilla
I am cautious about Mozilla’s data mining from their websites.
But at least they are keeping me in the loop about it.

(I don’t have to find out about the use of such tools by view-sourcing the web pages to find the beacons there.)

The web sites are running on Mozilla servers so knowing how people move around the sites can be useful to them.

Mitchell, it’s nice to be kept in the loop - thanks

By: John Francis Lee

John Francis Lee — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:54:51 +0000

‘ …because Mozilla no longer seems to be able to protect my privacy, or anyone else’s I’ve had to resort to treating firefox as some sort of malware… ‘

I guess you’ve taken a lot of money from Google and that’s why you’ve turned the same corner as they have.

I have to agree that you must be treated as not being on our side any longer.

By: Nivash Kumar

Nivash Kumar — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:33:05 +0000

You guys do not need to have a thought about doing this tracking just start doing it, Google has been doing this for a decade on a large number of people than you are targeting by their Google analytics. They offer analytics as a service to web admins but also obviously the results from all sites on the web would be logged by Google themselves. They say it helps to improve the quality of service. Unless common people are aware of something called as cookies you can mine data.

But do not throw a cookie that expires on 2038 like Google did, When I heard that for the first time I really did not like it. For a corporation like Mozilla,this type of a clear objective mentioned before implementing is a good way to convey a message to people that “We’re always a good company” and things ” for the benefit of public” like you mitchell always say in conferences. This post shows you are really OPEN. Good luck mining data!

By: Mozilla

Mozilla — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:23:33 +0000

They have their API open right? I think alot of their practices rubbed off on Google

By: Iang

Iang — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:39:01 +0000

Good stuff! It is great to see some brainstorming on the different possibilities. No internal team can see everything and often develops blind spots. Opening up the process, even when highly sensitive, allows all sorts of help to come out. Open governance rocks!

By: Duane

Duane — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:29:53 +0000

Oh forgot to mention, because Mozilla no longer seems to be able to protect my privacy, or anyone elses I’ve had to resort to treating firefox as some sort of malware and blocking certain domains as firefox keeps phoning home with information after it was told not to in version 2, there was even more in version 3.

Yes it’s no secret but the sheer arrogance to turn this on by default at least opera has the good decency to nag us to turn it on, not turning it on for us and then telling us how good it was to send all the information to google.

So I can only recommend people blacklist numerous mozilla.com, mozilla.org and a few google.com domains/hostnames if you care about your privacy at all.

By: Duane

Duane — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:24:03 +0000

Because things change all the time I actually set a time out on the pastebin entry. However that said I did a packet dump a couple of weeks agon on firefox v3 beta4 (ubuntu hardy) and when I ran it for the first time, or create a new profile unless you disconnect from the net there really is some rather disturbing things occuring before you can prevent them.

http://pastebin.com/m79057aba

Among other things a cookie is being set from Mozilla’s site until 2038, there is at least one connection to google sites causing it to store a cookie as well, both of these pages were obvious, the javascript tracking bug from mozilla wasn’t though.

Something I didn’t realise that also happened, since no page or warning or information came up about it was that, Firefox pulls an RSS feed from mozilla which was redirected to a the BBC RSS feed.

I believe Debian/Ubuntu used to ship a static page, no doubt this was from Mozilla and allowed you to start up the damn browser without worring about being tracked from the get go by no less than 3 to 4 companies.

So how much of this blog entry was lip service exactly, because to me it seems like Mozilla can’t give the user data away fast enough.

By: Basil Hashem

Basil Hashem — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:10:58 +0000

@Reed: As far as I’m aware, we are not currently sharing any cookie data or web log info with third-parties. I believe that the Dec-07 revision of the policy was done in preparation for using Omniture/Google Analytics. It’s inaccurate. We’ll roll back the privacy policy to pre-Dec07 and have it reflect reality. Thanks.

By: Toe

Toe — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:17:54 +0000

The last line of Sander’s comment echoes mine: It would be interesting if Mozilla could take an existing open-source analytics package under its wing to bring it up to the level required. It may not be a ‘Mozilla platform’ project, but then, neither are things like Bugzilla. It might not quite meet the ‘available now’ need, but I don’t think this to be an all-or-nothing thing. Perhaps Omniture (or another system) could be used on the Phase 1/2 sites, while the newly Mozilla-ized open source system is being honed on the Phase 4 sites.

By: reed

reed — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:11:14 +0000

The current privacy policy at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/privacy-policy.html states “Mozilla sends this information to a third-party service provider to help Mozilla analyze this data. It is possible to link cookies to personally-identifying information, thereby permitting Web site operators, including our third-party analytics provider, to track the online movements of particular individuals.”

That sure sounds like cookie data is already being sent to a third-party… However, your blog post (section #12) says the exact opposite thing. Which one is correct?