Re-enabling telemetry

Posted Jul 29, 2024 20:49 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Re-enabling telemetry by KJ7RRV
Parent article: Lessons from the death and rebirth of Thunderbird

> Yes, I'm asking if there is a way for me to opt in and enable telemetry when my distro has opted out,

Assuming your distro didn't patch it out altogether (highly unlikely), this should just be a matter of turning the default back on. See this page for the specifics:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-telemetry

(That page also shows how to examine the gathered data, for those that want to ground this discussion in facts rather than conspiratorial hand-waving)

Re-enabling telemetry

Posted Jul 30, 2024 1:53 UTC (Tue) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't enable it that way. "Allow Thunderbird to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" (along with the associated checkbox) is grayed out, and a note below it says "Data reporting is disabled for this build configuration."

Re-enabling telemetry

Posted Jul 30, 2024 14:48 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I can't enable it that way. "Allow Thunderbird to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" (along with the associated checkbox) is grayed out, and a note below it says "Data reporting is disabled for this build configuration."

It looks like you're going to have to either run an upstream-provided binary [1] or compile your own. [2]

You might consider filing a bug ticket against your distro's package requesting that instead of completely disabling telemetry capabilities, they leave it in but set the default to off.

[1] Obtainable via Snap and Flathub, and from thunderbird.net directly.
[2] Perhaps by taking your distro package and removing the "Telemetry removal" patch?