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Date:      Thu, 14 Jul 2016 19:39:45 -0500
From:      Brandon J. Wandersee <brandon.wandersee@gmail.com>
To:        Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: borderline OT fireox question
Message-ID:  <86poqfohta.fsf@WorkBox.Home>
In-Reply-To: <20160714220944.2f05391f@archlinux.localdomain>
References:  <5e4a20fe-51a4-ac10-4f72-23fcc3d04c15@hiwaay.net> <20160714002117.224b64ae@archlinux.localdomain> <8cd76e2e-ed11-7b3b-be75-de6bb4dcc092@hiwaay.net> <20160714063744.snaqwdbmzhd4ndb5@dijkstra.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de> <86r3awnh1i.fsf@WorkBox.Home> <20160714220944.2f05391f@archlinux.localdomain>

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Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions writes:

> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:41:45 -0500, Brandon J. Wandersee wrote:
>>Google and Mozilla are competitors (and therefore Google won't be
>>getting anything from Firefox)
>
> Type   about:config   into Firefox's address bar, then after ignoring
> the warning, in the search bar type   google  . How do you think works
> safe browsing and what do you think are the URLs good for? What is the
> geo location URL good for? Firefox shares high amounts of data with
> Google.

This doesn't record personal information. The geolocation feature
certainly uses the IP address at which you're currently accessing the
Internet to tell where in the world you are at this particular moment,
but not *who* you are or what you're searching for. (Unless you're
browsing from home, and your ISP is openly sharing your account
information with others, then the IP address can't reliably say anything
about the who is doing the browsing, just where it's being done.) The
Firefox "safe browsing" setting refers to the Google database of
malicious/suspicious websites for its anti-phishing protection. It's not
recording your every keystroke and feeding it to Google.

This is all beside the point. The first sentence in this thread was:

> I notice that whenever I start typing text into the serch-bar of
> Firefox ... it suggests completions for me, implying that Google has
> my identity pegged.

That's just downright fallacious. The mere existence of the "suggestion"
option doesn't mean every Firefox user's browsing is being tracked, and
even if we assume that it did mean as much it does not follow that the
entity doing the tracking must be Google. The "suggestions" option has
nothing to do with Google *unless* you use Google as your search engine
via the Firefox interface.[1]

Of course I retrieved that information using Firefox, and for all anyone
knows I may have landed on the linked-to page through a Google search,
and Google may have deliberately led me to a site chockful of
misinformation in order to sustain the large-scale cover-up of its
nefarious solar system domination scheme. So maybe that information
can't be trusted.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-popular-search-suggestions-firefox-search-bar?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Search+suggestions
-- 

::  Brandon J. Wandersee
::  brandon.wandersee@gmail.com
::  --------------------------------------------------
::  'The best design is as little design as possible.'
::  --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------



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