> but one can image that they want to understand where are people getting these copies of ff if they do not download them themselves.
These people are getting it obviously from their admins! (Like myself. I push Firefox updates to close to 1000 PCs. I thought (amongst other things) I'm doing them a favour by saving them traffic.) They obviously know that! The real reason they are doing this is simply because they started collecting data. Now they are hooked and constantly want more. That is all there is to it. They already identify each individual installation, so someone on the team said: Let's identify each download too.
> These people are getting it obviously from their admins!
That's one possibility. And even if you pretend it's the only one, it's still interesting how that's distributed. Is it X admins of 1000-PC orgs, or X*500 people who also install it on dads PC? Count how often each token is used, and you got a histogram, and if you just record that you've not collected anything remotely sensitive about any user. This question can be answered extremely cleanly.
I'm an admin of Y orgs + a hand full of private (dad) PCs. The information is useless. They collect it because they can. (Well technically I also push a installation profile that deactivates all known telemetry. So hopefully they get nothing.)
> This question can be answered extremely cleanly.
I pushed it to tens of thousands of endpoints in the past :P
Though we have long since moved it to optional. First we moved to Chrome as the "standard browser" due to user requests and eventually our management caved in to Microsoft's constant pushing to make Edge the standard browser. Not that I cared because both are bad for privacy obviously.
But the amount of lobbying for edge that they do makes me really sceptical. It's clearly not about having their pet project succeed, they must have some serious strategy hinging on this. Edge doesn't make them any money on its own as it's a free product so the revenue must come from side channels of its use instead.
Which, considering MS' past with IE and their recent ventures into tracking and advertising in the OS is probably bad news for the end user :(
These people are getting it obviously from their admins! (Like myself. I push Firefox updates to close to 1000 PCs. I thought (amongst other things) I'm doing them a favour by saving them traffic.) They obviously know that! The real reason they are doing this is simply because they started collecting data. Now they are hooked and constantly want more. That is all there is to it. They already identify each individual installation, so someone on the team said: Let's identify each download too.