You probably don’t want to be using Firefox Beta. Its purpose is to give feedback to the devs and that feedback telemetry is likely being interpreted as tracking here…
Firefox Beta is for anyone who wants to use a version 1 month ahead of the latest stable Firefox version, and AFAIK it doesn’t have more telemetry than stable Firefox versions.
Regardless, you can disable telemetry and studies by setting some preferences in
about:config
(or auser.js
file):Preferences to set
Source: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/fd72683abe15/user.js#L131-L175
Preference value datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled
false
datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.unified
false
toolkit.telemetry.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.server
data:,
toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.newProfilePing.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.updatePing.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.bhrPing.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.firstShutdownPing.enabled
false
toolkit.telemetry.coverage.opt-out
true
toolkit.coverage.opt-out
true
toolkit.coverage.endpoint.base
browser.ping-centre.telemetry
false
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry
false
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry
false
app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled
false
app.normandy.enabled
false
app.normandy.api_url
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Hmm, well, does your App Tracking Protection say anything about what it’s blocking here or how it decided that this traffic is for tracking?
Personally, I have a lot of trust that Mozilla isn’t doing shenanigans, because they don’t have a profit motive and I have yet to see a case of Mozilla supposedly being evil, which doesn’t turn out to just look like that superficially.
Well, and I don’t have a lot of trust in such tracking blockers to only block tracking of personal data. They can’t actually look at the data being sent, so they massively err on the side of just blocking any telemetry, even if it is completely anonymized / purely technical.
Yeah, it’s pretty understandable to associate telemetry with wrongdoing. There’s been so much of it that it’s easier to switch it off.
There’s a lot of useful, non-personal data they have legitimate reason to collect. Namely, app profiling data for profile-guided optimization which can improve the performance of the browser by analyzing how it runs on actual devices.
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That’s not what I wanted to say with that. I will put them under a lot of scrutiny. I tried to explain, why I am willing to put them under a lot of scrutiny rather than just assuming evil corporations be evil.
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Are you sure the tracking data is Firefox itself and not the websites you visit?
I use Blockada and it lists every single tracker it blocked and the adress it was on. Firefox doesn’t show up but a lot of Websites I visited with it.
Or it may be the telemetry/performance data that gets blocked.
Here’s information about it and how to opt out
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