Here’s the information about it. It’s anonymous and It can be turned off https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
Yes. The problem with cookies was that they could be used to track and identify you. If this can’t do that, then what’s the issue?
The problem is supporting ad networks.
Edit: /s because apparently it wasn’t obvious. Anonymous is obviously better.
Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the others definitely try to keep it just anonymous enough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.
Edit: typos
Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.
Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.
Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.
Cookies are a non-issue. They store data only locally and can be edited and removed at will. With third party isolation on by default there’s really no reason to worry about them much anymore. And if you do just install cookie auto-delete to clean things up.
This variant is definitely worse because the data is no longer just local.