Just want to add a little volume to the general opinion here that collecting user data, no matter how anonymous, is a terrible idea for a product whose only appealing quality is that it respects its users privacy.
Data is both highly alluring and addictive as evinced here by Mozilla potentially willing to shoot itself in the foot to get some. What's to keep this from becoming a frog in a boiling water kind of situation? How can I trust that Mozilla is going to adhere to their own stated standards? The easiest answer is that I won't have to because I can just use something else. Personally, the only reason I use Firefox is because it's slightly less convenient to set up a secruity-patched version of Chromium.
Other people in this thread have made the excellent points of the fact that not enough people opting in to data collection is in itself a critical piece of data. Moreover, things such as "Which top sites are users visiting?" can be answered by looking at data from page ranking services and then they can go to those sites on their own testing equipment to answer their other questions. A little investment in acquiring this data by not spying and maybe getting a wider array of testing equipment is probably less costly than the potential for loss in market share that they're already struggling to hold.
Data is both highly alluring and addictive as evinced here by Mozilla potentially willing to shoot itself in the foot to get some. What's to keep this from becoming a frog in a boiling water kind of situation? How can I trust that Mozilla is going to adhere to their own stated standards? The easiest answer is that I won't have to because I can just use something else. Personally, the only reason I use Firefox is because it's slightly less convenient to set up a secruity-patched version of Chromium.
Other people in this thread have made the excellent points of the fact that not enough people opting in to data collection is in itself a critical piece of data. Moreover, things such as "Which top sites are users visiting?" can be answered by looking at data from page ranking services and then they can go to those sites on their own testing equipment to answer their other questions. A little investment in acquiring this data by not spying and maybe getting a wider array of testing equipment is probably less costly than the potential for loss in market share that they're already struggling to hold.