Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.

Some examples:

• Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
• Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
• Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared

And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.

Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.

Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.

You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.

But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.