Comment 542 for bug 269656

I think two things need to be added.

First: All this should be easy to find under Help -> About.

Second: As I understand it, when the service is turned on, Firefox contacts Google once every half hour (or some such) to update the blacklist. This should be mentioned.

By contacting Google, the browser informs Google about our browsing-time habits. This lets Google add some more details to its already vast repository of statistics on our habits, interests and other privacy-sensitive data.

Some people feel that it’s risky for our civil liberties that such huge amounts of private information gets concentrated at one entity. Because of this, such things must always be told very openly. People have a right to know about these things and decide for themselves. It may be unimportant when it's only used for serving ads, but important for someone who feels politically persecuted. That's for each person to decide. The information on Firefox doing this must be very openly available.

The text should mention whether the only identifying information in these contacts is the user's IP address, or whether there's a more uniquely identifying cookie or some such.

In fact I wish that instead Firefox contacted Canonical or Mozilla to update the blacklist, and Canonical or Mozilla got the list from Google. Privacy information should be spread out among many different entities, not concentrated at one entity.