With the California Consumer Privacy Act(CCPA), Mozilla for the first time to offer a setting to users in Firefox 72 (which is scheduled to release on January 7, 2020) to request the company to delete their telemetry data.
Though CCPA will offer privacy protection regarding data collection for Califorinians only, Mozilla wants to expand the benefit of deleting telematry data to all Firefox users in 2020 with the next verison arriving on January 07.
“We’ve decided to go the extra mile and expand user deletion rights to incuding this telematry data in our systems.” Mozilla told in its Open Policy & Advocay blog.
Firefox may not collect personallly identifiable information, but it does gather technical and performance information that may help Mozilla engineers to improve browser performance and address bugs. This data will contain info such as number of tabs open and time period of the session but not about the websites you’ve visited and searches you’ved performed.
In line with the work we’ve done this year to make privacy easier and more accessible to our users, the deletion control will be built into Firefox and will begin rolling out in the next version of the browser on January 7. This setting will provide users a way to request deletion for desktop telemetry directly from Firefox – and a way for us, at Mozilla, to perform that deletion.
Here is what happens and how to request Mozilla to delete your telematry data for Firefox from their systems
1. In Firefox 72, click on hamburger menu > Optons
2. Privacy and Security > Firefox Data Collection and Use
3. Uncheck ” Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla”, with this request, a ping along with Clent _ID of your profile will be sent to Mozilla servers to delete telemetry data.
Firefox then shows a message to convey user that “You’re no longer allowing Mozilla to capture technical and interaction data.All Past data will be deleted within 30 days.”
The learn more links take you to SUMO page to explain information about this which currenntly not working.
More articles on Firefox 72:
Mozilla Firefox 72 Nightly now blocks Fingerprinting Scripts by default