Firefox's AI Toggle Turns Off Features, Not Data Collection
A recent retest of Firefox's AI settings found that flipping the 'off' switch for built-in AI features—like the sidebar chatbot integrations—doesn't fully disable the telemetry associated with them. Even with AI features toggled off, the browser continues to send certain usage signals tied to those components, according to the blog post making the rounds on Hacker News.
The author retested this after an earlier report, apparently prompted by Mozilla statements, to see if fixes had landed. The discrepancy seems to stem from how Firefox separates feature flags from telemetry probes: turning off the user-facing feature doesn't necessarily unregister the background data collection tied to it.
Mozilla has generally positioned itself as more privacy-conscious than Chrome, so gaps like this draw extra scrutiny from users who chose Firefox specifically for that reason.