Most people aren't vocal.

Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users.

Many vocal people aren't even users.

Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers.

If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the same evils we're trying to fight today. Unfortunately most evils are created from good intentions. I hear there's an entire road paved that way

If we replaced telemetry with some sort of survey emails and phone calls, we'd get exactly another 500-thread discussion on HN about how "Mozilla is collecting emails to sell to the highest bidder!", "Mozilla is sending us spam!" and whatnot.

I think at this point they know all these opinions pretty well, but they simply don't care or see better growth options by targeting users who don't belong to that particular bubble. They see OpenAI approaching the same active user counts as Facebook and they want a slice of that pie. And the majority of that pie is non-techies.

Arguing that telemetry is wrong doesn’t seem to have stopped Firefox from using it. If your fight against telemetry is a higher priority than your fight against AI in the browser, good luck and more power to you! I’m just making sure no one makes that decision by accident.