Dude I misread “Mozilla to require data collection in addons”, almost dropped my phone
mozilla does good things every once in a while
Probably by mistake though
How about Data-Collection Ban in All Firefox Extensions, Mozilla? How about that?
Except most extensions need to collect some data to work. Unless you want firefox to die, this isn’t a great idea.
They should do manual testing to confirn/deny this, in a mystery customer sort of way.
They have the Recommended Extensions program, where they do that for a subset of the available extensions.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-program
They should make it a requestable permission.
I’m not sure if that would be viable technically.
They might be able to make requestable the connection requests to outside sources (which I expect is something many extensions use, even those without data collection), but whether those requests relate to data collection is not something that can be determined programmatically.
Yes, all access to outside sources is blocked by default and users are asked on a per URL basis with the author manually requesting each URL access including a reason – with occasional manual validation from Mozilla staff.
Agreed, it should be this way. But I guess it would break most applications that rely on data collection (and I am saying that with a voice of sarcasm).
Calm down guys you’re asking for an actual feature, now… this is gonna need like five years of extensive study and testing.
So I can just declare ‘none’ and happily collect data?
Or is there actually some type of control?
Well, I guess they could. But at least its in the rules and people can report. And if it indeed violates the setting, then the addon could be removed from the repository. So there is an incentive for addon developers not to break that “promise”. At least this is the right direction.
Yes, but it’s about the tiniest step they could possibly take. It just officially makes violating “trust me, bro” against the rules, but does absolutely nothing to prevent it, nor allow the user to directly prevent such abuse. Some extensions don’t need Internet access at all, but there’s no (easy) way to stop it from happening. Others only need occasional access for updates, but there’s no user control for whether that’s all they’re doing.
Yes, it also narrows down the number of potential targets for analysis / report. If an extension is not marked “none” then no need to go out of your way to figure out if it does it.
For some extensions it might actually be relatively easy to figure out if they do communicate with an external server that they might not need to, specially considering that the extension format can easily be decompressed,
.crxfiles are justzipfiles with some javascript and other files inside… they might want to obfuscate the logic, but it’s not impossible to try and unravel things to some extent.
It has been a thing for longer that extensions are not allowed to make connections to the internet, unless it’s actually required for the functionality they advertise. And I believe, they have some rudimentary code scans in place to check for that. Besides that, there’s also their Recommended Extensions program, where they do thorough code reviews for a subset of available extensions.
I believe it was already required to disclose data collection, except you had to build the UI for that yourself. This makes it easier to comply, and more recognisable for us users.
Good update!
I really like Mozilla Firefox… Keeps getting better. :-)
Hey did the patient on apple‘s crappy idea expire already?
how is knowing what data extensions collect a crappy idea?
