Firefox installs data collection extensions on your devices without your knowledge ... again

Start

Not so long ago, I picked up the phone with the Nokia 8110, which prompted me to start using WebIDE to experiment with KaiOS. Today I went to the debug page in extensions, and there:



... 2 uninvited guests appeared - fxmonitor@mozilla.org.xpi and telemetry-coverage-bug1487578@mozilla.org .

How so? After all, I remember exactly that I turned off telemetry in the settings of Firefox on purpose, did I really clean the profile and forgot to turn it off?
')


No, everything is off. And in the list of add-ons with other add-ons, including those with the Mozilla ADB Bridge, nothing is displayed.

Search

The first thing I wanted to do was ask about this on Reddit , where I received a response from a Mozilla employee that this behavior is the norm , and not telemetry at all. Judging by the Mozilla blog , these 2 extensions are installed without your knowledge to find out if you have telemetry enabled, and send this data to the Mozilla servers where they could process it.

déjà vu

After reading the response from Mozilla, I felt the feeling that I had already seen it somewhere. And not only in Windows 10.

A similar situation has already happened once, when Mozilla, without the knowledge of users, installed the LookingGlass add-on for everyone, asking the users if they would like to join the testing. Despite the fact that this extension did not start working by itself and waited for consent from the user, this caused a violent negative reaction, in particular, because of the possibility of Mozilla to put add-ons on users' browsers without demand.

At that time, the official apology was published:

We're sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. If you’re looking at what to do.

- We apologize for the confusion and for letting down the members of our community. Despite the fact that we had no intention or mechanism for collecting or sharing your information and Looking Glass was an optional and user-activated action, we had to give users the opportunity to install this addon themselves.

Judging by what happened, there is reason to doubt how sincere the apology from Mozilla was, although this time it was true, there was no talk of any “opt-in”.

Conclusion

Anyone who wants to check for the presence of a probe in their browser should go to the Debug addons page with about: addons, because addons are hidden by default, you can make sure they are present only knowing where to look for them.

The trust of users is a rather important resource for each company, especially if the company considers itself a champion in the privacy of its users.