To disable it in about:config
browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled = false
browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled = false
To disable it in about:config
browser.search.serpEventTelemetry.enabled = false
browser.search.serpEventTelemetryCategorization.enabled = false
Read what I said again. It is not automatically bad, and it doesn’t mean it can’t be poorly used or poorly understood by the ones collecting it. It just means that it is an effective way to understand how your users are using your product.
Putting Mozilla (which from what I can tell is doing as much as they can trying to collect this telemetry data in a way that can’t be used to identify its users) in the same domain as Microsoft, which collects pretty much everything it can to sell to third party advertisers is ridiculous as best and disingenuous at worst.
Mozilla and Microsoft have much in common when it comes to telemetry, in that they are both leaders in collecting quite a lot of it and they both spend a great deal of time and effort to analyze all that data so as to improve the user experience.
I hadn’t really considered the advertising angle, but now that you mention it I’m sure advertisers would also find all this thoroughly privacy-respecting anonymized data to be of interest when they’re considering the idea of paying for promotion through Firefox Suggest. Mitchell Baker may no longer be in charge of it, but there must still be some highly placed people over there who are fully on board with her vision of turning Firefox into a better advertising platform.