Tracking ads is also a problem, just a different one. The whole point of ads is to manipulate your behavior. There’s plenty of reason to not want to make that more effective

The entire goal is to use money to change your behavior. They’re inherently manipulative by definition. It’s literally weaponized mass manipulation. There’s no way to spin that as a positive effect.

If you think about it in terms of it’s effects, advertising is the closest thing we have to mind control: companies are paying money to change the behavior of millions of people. Even without any concrete examples, you can easily see how dystopic it really is when you just think about the intention alone

You’re talking about Thunderbird, a project they basically abandoned to the community. Thunderbird survives in spite of Mozilla, not because of it. Meanwhile their main product Firefox is still bleeding users down into the single digit percentages while receiving half a billion a year from Google. It takes a lot of skill to run such a company so deep into the ground.

Firefox actually had tab groups way back, but Mozilla, in their infinite wisdom, removed it because apparently their main mission now is to antagonize all their loyal power users.

I don’t think the car manufacturer is getting that data, but iirc the part of Android Auto that runs on the head unit does collect data when disconnected, then send it to Google when the phone is connected.