I guess the point that I’m not explaining well enough is the implication that this isn’t spying when you’re talking about things as abstracted as what OS a user is using.
No, you’re explaining it just fine. Don’t try to condescendingly imply that anyone who disagrees with you must just be too stupid to understand.
In reality, I fully understand your argument and and am still saying that you’re wrong. Collecting data about the user that they didn’t explicitly opt in to giving you is spying, end of. It doesn’t matter what the data is or what supposed justification you have for it.
If Mozilla really needs to know that badly what OS their users are using, they can do all sorts of other things: they could measure downloads of the installers for different OSs from their website. They could send out surveys. They could ask websites what user-agent strings are being reported (which is also problematic – by default, Firefox ought to leave that field of the HTTP header blank – but at least the user is affirmatively choosing to communicate with that site). They don’t have to make Firefox phone home. They choose to make it phone home because that’s cheap and lazy, but when it comes at the cost of users’ privacy that’s a 100% unethical trade-off to make!
No, you’re explaining it just fine. Don’t try to condescendingly imply that anyone who disagrees with you must just be too stupid to understand.
In reality, I fully understand your argument and and am still saying that you’re wrong. Collecting data about the user that they didn’t explicitly opt in to giving you is spying, end of. It doesn’t matter what the data is or what supposed justification you have for it.
If Mozilla really needs to know that badly what OS their users are using, they can do all sorts of other things: they could measure downloads of the installers for different OSs from their website. They could send out surveys. They could ask websites what user-agent strings are being reported (which is also problematic – by default, Firefox ought to leave that field of the HTTP header blank – but at least the user is affirmatively choosing to communicate with that site). They don’t have to make Firefox phone home. They choose to make it phone home because that’s cheap and lazy, but when it comes at the cost of users’ privacy that’s a 100% unethical trade-off to make!