hello mickcmc, can you explain in a bit more detail in which regard you consider top sites as privacy breach?

just some general thoughts: top sites will only be available to you locally on your phone - if you don't like the sites populated from frequent visits you can also select your own sites to be shown in this spot by long tapping and pinning them in your bookmarks or history.
firefox also has a guest browsing mode (under settings > extra) in case you want to hand it over to a friend temporarily...
if you don't want to have other people to have access to your device, then it's best to set a pass-phrase or unlock-gesture at the level of your operating system.

furthermore in the upcoming version of firefox 29, it will possible to customize the elements of the awesome-screen which includes the option to hide the top sites...

The existence of top sites provides an easy way to see the sites that I have visited, either by overlooking my device, or by forcing me to use the complex and irritating processes you describe to mitigate something that should be optional anyway.

Hurry up with the next update to ensure that this privacy issue is eliminated. Please.

Mick

firefox is released on a fixed schedule firefox 29 will arrive as beta in the google play store in roughly 3 weeks and as final version at the end of april.

The "top sites" feature is AWFUL!! Had hoped that with updates it would disappear but it's still there. No options to "unpin" or delete or create my own that don't change. Is there any chance that developers will create a speed dial type add-on like the desktop version of FVD speed dial? Love that. But if not, at least a blank page or one with just a search engine would be preferable.

Jayne, you can pin your own sites or remove top sites completely: Customize the Firefox home screen

I've already read this article. There is NO option to unpin the sites that are currently there. New ones keep showing up. "Pin" is a choice but it's already there and there's no way to get rid of it. I know how to hide the entire top sites screen but I'd like to pin my true top sites. Bad feature, I think. Maybe in some newer iteration of FF it will be fixed.

that's strange - on my device i've pinned my personal favourites to the top site slots months ago and they stayed there ever since without any change...

Then how do you "unpin" something you don't want. That option doesn't appear. Even on sites I've pinned, there's still no option to unpin.

in order to unpin i long-tap & unpin/remove - to change a spot to a different address you can long-tap and edit

Yes, I can edit and change a spot to a site of my choosing. Then there's a pin icon and I can unpin the address I chose. The spot then goes back to something that I never chose in the first place, no pin icon, no opportunity to unpin. I don't know where these spots came from (e.g., 2 of them are for 10-minute email). There are 6 spots in all and they all have the FF icon on them. This feature need work! My only choice is to hide "top sites" entirely, I guess

the spots are filled by an algorithm taking into account the frequency and the recency of visited sites, which should also be updated to reflect your usage pattern (this will obviously not work well when you clean your history regularly). if the automatic algorithm doesn't produce good results in your case you could also fill all the spots manually with sites of your choosing.

You can manually choose the sites by selecting the edit menu item when long pressing on a site image.

Yes, i can do that. But, why are there sites that I never put there and I can't get rid of them. If I fill those site spaces with something else, I can then unpin the one I've chosen but then the previous ones come back. I believe it's just a flaw in the program--FF just isn't ready for prime-time on Android.

And when I subsequently unpin my own sites, these other annoying ones come back--I never chose them in the first place.