Telemetry on Firefox

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RCPrimak, Woody, NoelC, PKC, et.al,
In dealing with temp files and other “unwanted” or lost files on ones’ drive, I must mention Firefox. I like Firefox and use it but please be aware that Mozilla like MS, is going for the telemetry. I had my telemetry off but after years of using Firefox I found that there were HUNDREDS of telemetry/data files stored on my hard drive -even- though I had telemetry unchecked and Firefox Health off too.

Below is what I saw months (years?) ago on the subject.

KarmaQ said, “However, after setting this to false the folder is still created. After looking around I found:  Preferences — Mozilla Source Tree Docs 41.0a1 documentation Which says:    Allow pings to be archived locally. This can only be enabled if unified is on.
So, in addition to setting:    toolkit.telemetry.enabled and toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled
to false, I also set:    toolkit.telemetry.unified   to false.
This seems to have stopped the folder/files being created. ”
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2945477

I did the same and it stopped the archiving of telemetry files.

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SueW, HiFlyer

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From Catalin Cimpanu, on bleepingcomputer.com, on Firefox telemetry:

 
Mozilla Testing New Default Opt-Out Setting for Firefox Telemetry Collection
August 22, 2017

Mozilla engineers are discussing plans to change the way Firefox collects usage data (telemetry), and the organization is currently preparing to test an opt-out clause an opt-out clause so they could collect more data relevant to the browser’s usage….

Read the full article here

 
Mozilla Will Delete Firefox Crash Reports Collected by Accident
January 2, 2018

Mozilla said last week it would delete all telemetry data collected because of a bug in the Firefox crash reporter.

According to Mozilla engineers, Firefox has been collecting information on crashed background tabs from users’ browsers since Firefox 52, released in March 2017.

Firefox versions released in that time span did not respect user-set privacy settings and automatically auto-submitted crash reports to Mozilla servers. The browser maker fixed the issue with the release of Firefox 57.0.3.

Read the full article here

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HiFlyer, Elly

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@anonymous thanks for the heads up there. I do a weekly disk clean up with a 3rd party tool, no not CCleaner, and was wondering why Firefox Quantum was storing an inordinate amount of Data. I had just assumed it was being used more as I am testing it out actively to use as a default to replace Edge and\or IE11 this warrants further investigation. I suppose the good news is its getting cleaned out but the bad news is just what is it sending to who knows where and what is it downloading in the background?

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Using Fire Fox and Cyber Fox; have noticed the slowness of both, not all of the time, just most of the time. Have changed settings in about:config and it makes something of a difference but do not know to what extent. Also, used CCleaner; any known problems with it?

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Here is a Mozilla site for the about:config entries:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

CCleaner is fine with Firefox, BUT, if you keep Last Used Session Tabs, uncheck the Session check box or it will clear out your last sessions tabs that you had been keeping. (Note: they may have fixed that in newer versions).

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SueW

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Security tweaks to Firefox are detailed in AKB3000003 Firefox: Additional Security, Telemetry and Security Tweaks

The Knowledge Base Listing is the best place to see the AKB articles.

Ccleaner has had some security issues in the recent past.

2 users thanked author for this post.

JDeC, SueW

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