It would be simpler to use something like Portmaster to compare the domains it connects to.
The difficulty is that you still want the browser itself and the extensions to update and that would still happpen on a Mozilla domain.
It should be possible to disable all telemetry in the config. If I were concerned about their telemetry I would be more concerned about whether I got all of them without breaking something else. The people building things like the arkenfox script are far more knowledgeable than me on the subject.
Librewolf does openly state that it aims to remove all telemetry. And I’ve grown to like it.
I find it somewhat unusable on platforms other than Linux though.
As some notes on the terms of service changes.
The more controversial terms potentially align with the introduction of an optional AI tool built into the browser and the data necessary to process and maintain it.
Although it does appear to have changed again to simply.
”You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.”
I don’t have a legal background.
But I believe the issue here is that, as precise and definitive as legal language is it can simultaneously be broad and meaningless.
A simple question like where the content is being displayed could be answered by both “on the browser” and “on the server” or even “both” depending on the exact technical and legal interpretations being applied.
Taking the below from a TechCrunch article in March.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
If I use a Firefox account to sync things like browsing history, that’s likely hosted in another country. I’m also likely accessing websites outside either country. So it has to be worldwide because these things change too often in most cases.
Firefox needs permission to process that information and they probably use other services to host it. So the rights can’t be exclusive.
These terms are all broad enough that they can mean entirely different things depending on who reads them and how they actually process the data.
For Comparison, snippets from Google’s current terms which apply to Chrome.
All the same terms are in there. Slight issue in that they apply to far more than just Chrome though.
This license is:
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worldwide, which means it’s valid anywhere in the world
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non-exclusive, which means you can license your content to others
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royalty-free, which means there are no monetary fees for this license
This license allows Google to:
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host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go
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publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others
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modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it
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sublicense these rights to:
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other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people you choose
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our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purpose section below