Does Firefox give useful data to Google?

I want to stop feeding the monster

[diberry]

I decided recently it's time to stop giving Google information about my websites and anything else they could conceivably use to further their dominance of search and the web in general. I've found great replacements for Analytics, Gmail, GReader, etc.

Then it occurred to me: doesn't Firefox have some kind of relationship with Google? And yes, Mozilla gets the majority of Firefox funding from Google. [en.wikipedia.org...]

The browser also sends Google's cookie with each update request. Some[who?] internet privacy advocacy groups have expressed concerns surrounding Google's possible uses of this data, especially that Firefox's privacy policy states that Google may share information (that is not personally identifying) gathered with "safebrowsing" service with third parties, including business partners.[197] Following Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments in December 2009 regarding privacy during a CNBC show,[198] Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development suggested that users use the Bing search engine instead of Google search.[199

I don't know how concerned to be about this? I would just switch to IE, because I'm confident MSN ain't givin' Google nothin', LOL, except I need a portable browser in some environments and it's not available that way. And sadly, a lot of browsers seem to have questionable relationships with Google [opera.com...]

Please note: Opera Software cooperates with HitsLink.com, Google Analytics, addthis.com, AdMob, and Otrs.org. HitsLink and Google Analytics is established in the United States and has entered into the Safe Harbor agreement, which entails that they must ensure an adequate standard for privacy protection in light of applicable EU rules and regulations.

Are we feeding the monster by using these browsers, or is Google not really getting any info from them that they wouldn't get from elsewhere?

[diberry]

I should add that the only Google sites I will access from my browser are Google Affiliate Marketing (which I can't afford to dump at this point) and my Adsense account, which I can't get rid of without getting rid of GAM.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

AFAIK if you make sure that you are not logged in to Google while browsing you should be OK?

[diberry]

@BeeDeeDubbleU, I've been unable to find any strong evidence against what you're saying. Since I do log into Google Affiliate Manager regularly (the only Google service I really use), for now I'm just setting whatever browser I use to dump the cookies immediately after I log out (or I do it myself manually). *shrug*