“To date, the industry has not typically considered telemetry data “personal data” because it isn’t identifiable to a specific person, but we feel strongly that taking this step is the right one for people and the ecosystem.” Mozilla even tried to downplay the impact of their privacy decision, saying in their announcement: While the fact that Firefox collects telemetry data may be well known to some security minded researchers, and even viewed as acceptable because of reasons such as “debugging,” it is quite the revelation that Mozilla actually maintains this data in a way that is matchable to an individual user’s IP address that is requesting said data be deleted. By moving the IP address into this restricted environment this de-identifies the collected telemetry data.” Firefox stores your telemetry data in a way that can be tied back to you The IP is then stripped from the telemetry data set and moved to an environment with restricted access for security and error review purposes only.
“Mozilla does initially receive the IP as part of telemetry technical data. A Mozilla spokesperson explained how the IP address of all telemetry pings, not just the deletion-request ping, is stored: Mozilla confirmed to Privacy Online News that all this data is stored, but they don’t seem to consider it a privacy issue because they are stored separately. That is all the information that’s needed to tie your telemetry data back to your specific browser instance. Specifically, when you request your telemetry data be deleted from Mozilla’s servers, you do so by sending a “ deletion-request” ping which by virtue of how internet pings work, includes a timestamp, your IP address and your unique client ID – as confirmed by Mozilla. When users choose to delete their telemetry, the Firefox browser will submit this identifier to Mozilla and we will then delete data on our servers associated with this ID.”
Full public documentation about this data collection, including the identifier, can be found here.
That clientID is not linked to you personally or any sensitive data (for example to your name or phone number) but to your local Firefox software installation. The data collected is associated with a randomly generated identifier that is unique to each Firefox client. This does not include data that can reveal sensitive information about users’ activity online, such as search queries or the websites users visit.
“By default, Mozilla collects limited data from Firefox to help us understand how people are using the browser, such as information about the number of open tabs and windows or number of webpages visited.
After all, how else would Mozilla be able to delete just your telemetry data upon request? To answer this question, Privacy Online News reached out to Mozilla and a Mozilla spokesperson explained how the telemetry data is associated with your browser instance: 2020 is a year of clear vision, and we get to start it off with the revelation that Firefox stores telemetry data in a way that can be traced back to an individual user. The change by Mozilla comes as a result of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a state law which came into effect at the turn of the new year. Sure, the collection of this telemetry data can be turned off, but the vast majority of Firefox users are not using Firefox with telemetry turned off, and are therefore incredibly vulnerable. Mozilla maintains “strict limits” on how long they store this logged telemetry data, but any duration is too long if the telemetry data can be associated with an individual Firefox browser instance on a particular IP address through a government request. Mozilla recently announced that they would be allowing any Firefox user a means to request Mozilla to delete stored telemetry data that is tied to said user. The Firefox Browser is not as private as you may think – especially on iOS and Android.