Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development. These categories are based on 20 high-level content types, such as "sports,” “business,” and “travel”. This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties. (read more)
The Copy Without Site Tracking option can now remove parameters from nested URLs. It also includes expanded support for blocking over 300 tracking parameters from copied links, including those from major shopping websites. Keep those trackers away when sharing links!
You’re conveniently missing the point that there is an actually labeled telemarketing partner that is opt-out. That’s not user habit collection. You’re also missing that “random future studies” should not be auto-enabled by default either. Finally, the topic of this particular post is about categorizing search queries, which as far as they describe it isn’t something your browser should care about.
The only thing that may be legitimate is, as you say, actual UX and feature usage. But for that to be done properly, you have to ask and make it opt-in, as with any data collection scheme. It’s actually a requirement in some places.
The point is, people give shit to chrome because “evil google collects your habits data and monetize them”, while people like you are a-ok with Firefox openly sending data to a third-party marketing partner on opt-out conditions and, as demonstrated by today’s post, adding more collection that have absolutely nothing to do with the behavior of the browser and all to do with user habits.
If you go through my comment history you’ll find me saying, multiple times, that Mozilla has worked itself into this problem, by adding far more people than they need. The browser would be healthier, I suspect, if there was a 50-strong, open-collective backed, dev team working on just the browser. At the minute the org is enormous and they now need to find a way to pay for that enormous org.