Fedora ain't playin' around w/Firefox 3.

[Joe Smith]

bruce wrote:
> the issue of the FF security measures (and others) is that the data
> on the URLs you visit might go back to a 3rd party company (IE
> google), which could/would therefore have a track of the sites that
> you visit. ...

You bring up a good point, one that I hadn't thought too much about before.

Except that isn't what's happening--at least according to Moz:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/

> What information is sent to Mozilla or its partners when Phishing and
> Malware Protection are enabled?
> 
> There are two times when Firefox will communicate with Mozilla's
> partners while using Phishing and Malware Protection. The first is
> during the regular updates to the lists of reporting phishing and
> malware sites. No information about you or the sites you visit is
> communicated during list updates. The second is in the event that you
> encounter a reported phishing or malware site. Before blocking the
> site, Firefox will request a double-check to ensure that the reported
> site has not been removed from the list since your last update. In
> both cases, existing cookies you have from google.com, our list
> provider, may also be sent.
> 
> The Mozilla Privacy Policy expressly forbids the collection of this
> data by Mozilla or its partners for any purpose other than
> improvement of the Phishing and Malware Protection feature. The
> Google Privacy Policy explains how Google handles user cookies.

This would be easy to verify, either through the FF source, or by 
sniffing the traffic.

If Mozilla was feeding Google browsing history, even under a "we won't 
peek" promise, it would be a huge scandal. Since it would be easy for 
anyone to check if it was happening, I feel pretty sure that it's not 
happening and that I don't even have to trust Google not to peek: they 
don't have the data to peek at.

<Joe