Why is the telemetry box grayed out and checked in the beta version of thunderbird? I’m assuming that means it’s always on and can’t be disabled? Is this correct? If so why? There is NO good reason to force telemetry on a user. As an entity that makes free software you should know this.
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I’m not sure but perhaps it is forced for betas, nightlies and developer releases to make analyzing numbers easier when trialing fixes and new features. IIRC, telemetry data doesn’t allow for user identification. I’m guessing this setting is controlled by toolkit.telemetry.enabled which shows as being locked in the configuration editor.
I think/hope you will find that this setting is not locked in release builds
The problem is I can’t use release builds because they don’t have wayland support compiled in and my systems don’t have XWayland. Which is why this is particularly annoying for me. I either have to install software I don’t want/need or I need to accept telemetry involuntarily.
Ah - if it’s not forced in FIrefox then perhaps it is a THunderbird bug. Please file a bug report against Thunderbird
Yeah, it actually IS in firefox…except they don’t even show the option but I just decided to dig through about:config to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my ass. I was, which is why I edited the post. It’s just never caught my attention before because they hide the setting. I’m pretty salty about this but I guess there’s not a lot I can do.
At some point you should have been given a choice when you first install - opt-in or out, I forget which.
Install? It’s just a tarball
This should be fixed right away. The practice is becoming far too common. Microsoft is to blame for slowly boiling the frogs into complacence, but Mozilla should know better, and should be actively speaking out against it. Tech people, the most likely to beta test, are the first to get angry about this kind of thing. Opt-out is bad enough, but forced is crossing the line. So I can’t be a beta tester and, even though it’s possible to opt-out in the release version, I think I’m going to move over to Claws Mail. I’m sick of having to constantly watch my back.