[Farow]

Usage times, usage intensity, list of all extensions, country of origin. I don't understand why they'd need those to improve Firefox.

Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.

[sfink]

(I work for Mozilla, though far from where decisions about telemetry would be made.)

Usage times and intensity are of high value when trying to improve market share. People who barely use the browser are at high risk of stopping use altogether. (For example, they might use multiple browsers, but most of their activity occurs on another and if they figure out multiple profiles or something, they'll leave altogether.) You can't do an A/B test to see what improves usage intensity if you don't measure usage intensity. Also, it's far from PII. And making it opt-in would make the stats useless; people who explicitly choose to allow telemetry are going to have vastly different usage patterns than the bulk of people who do not so choose.

Extensions are very important for crash reports. Far less than they used to be; many crashes could only happen when an extension did something specific. Extensions are now sandboxed enough that this isn't nearly as common, but if a crash signature has a high correlation with a particular extension, it can easily turn a non-actionable bug into something actionable.

Extensions for general telemetry are iffier. The info is fairly high value for things like understanding how people are using the browser and what features are popular or missing. But rare extensions also provide a lot of fingerprinting info. It's important to keep those metrics away from PII, and recorded independently so they can't be correlated.

Country of origin is pretty clearly useful. Mozilla has to allocate resources across countries, including marketing resources, but I would think it's really product management where it matters most. Users gain a lot of benefit from the browser adapting to different markets. (Screenshots have a wildly different importance in countries with Asian writing systems; Europe and especially Germany take privacy much more seriously.)

> Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.

Heh. I do not want to predict what our marketing people will or won't do. I have mixed feelings about quite a few things. I'm not happy about ads appearing anywhere in the interface. But I'm also not happy about being dependent on Google ad money.

[saagarjha]

> And making it opt-in would make the stats useless; people who explicitly choose to allow telemetry are going to have vastly different usage patterns than the bulk of people who do not so choose.

How about the profiles of the people who opt-out?