With Firefox 75, we’re launching a new scheduled task for Windows that will help us understand changes in default browser settings. As with all other telemetry related changes here at Mozilla, this scheduled task has gone through our data review, a process designed with user choice and privacy at its core…
Here’s a breakdown of the data we’re looking at, and the steps we’ve taken to ensure your privacy:
- We’re collecting information related to the system’s current and previous default browser setting, as well as the operating system locale and version. This data cannot be associated with regular profile based telemetry data. If you’re interested in the schema, you can find it here.
- The information we collect is sent as a background telemetry ping every 24 hours.
- We’ll respect user configured telemetry opt-out settings by looking at the most recently used Firefox profile.
- We’ll respect custom Enterprise telemetry related policy settings if they exist. We’ll also respect policy to specifically disable this task.
Collecting telemetry is one way we’re able to ensure we can understand default browser trends in a way that helps us improve Firefox. It’s our hope that by better understanding more about our users and their choices around browser preferences, we can continue to build a better Firefox.
If you’re a Windows user, you can learn more about default browser settings and Firefox here.