I'll also contend this is a disturbing, terrible idea.
I design optimization algorithms and software professionally and the majority of that software is released open source. Now, does my software likely run terribly on some problems that my users give it? Absolutely. That probably costs me business because they get frustrated, give up, and go somewhere else. And, to combat that, I could absolutely engineering my libraries to send anonymized information about their problem structure back to my company. Certainly, it would help me improve my software and algorithms. I also view it as horribly unethical, a breach of my customers trust, and an unacceptable course of action. Look, I want my software to work well for everyone, but it's part of my job to figure out when things don't well and fix that beyond scraping information about my customers uses automatically.
I contend this is a terrible idea and very much would like Mozilla to abandon it.
I design optimization algorithms and software professionally and the majority of that software is released open source. Now, does my software likely run terribly on some problems that my users give it? Absolutely. That probably costs me business because they get frustrated, give up, and go somewhere else. And, to combat that, I could absolutely engineering my libraries to send anonymized information about their problem structure back to my company. Certainly, it would help me improve my software and algorithms. I also view it as horribly unethical, a breach of my customers trust, and an unacceptable course of action. Look, I want my software to work well for everyone, but it's part of my job to figure out when things don't well and fix that beyond scraping information about my customers uses automatically.
I contend this is a terrible idea and very much would like Mozilla to abandon it.