This amounts to far less than "slapping Google tracking into everything they do", which reasonable people would interpret to include just using the browser. Reasonable people also understand that performing Google searches sends data to Google.

Safe Browsing DOES NOT reveal URLs to Google. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing#Privacy and read the protocol spec or Firefox source code if you doubt this.

> Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device.

Mozilla has made a significant investment to try to get away from this by building the Mozilla Location Service. In the meantime it's a straight tradeoff between quality of user experience and information leakage. Experience shows that degrading the user experience for some invisible and small privacy benefit is not a winning strategy.

Safe Browsing doesn't report plaintext urls to Google. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing and the more precisely the Update API it's using from https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/

Safe Browsing in Firefox is nothing more than a flat list of malware-laden sites your browser downloads. It compares your current site against the list to warn you if a match occurs. It does nothing else whatsoever. Even the most basic search of technical details would show that. Firefox code is also open to be read.

> Firefox has a built-in feature called "Google Safe Browsing" which collates every URL you visit and sends bulk reports to Google. This feature is only disable-able via the "here be dragons" about:config area.

Is this not 'about:preferences' -> Privacy & Security -> Block dangerous and deceptive content ?

"One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe."

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

Thanks for the clarification - this is all acceptable in my eyes then. Of course I never use Google Search (prefer Qwant, StartPage and DDG) and location services are never running in my browser. Safe Browsing - I prefer not to have it enabled, but it's not such a risk if it is.

This is quite a different thing from using Chrome(-ish browsers) with the "phone home".