> Mozilla Persona is federated, so the BrowserId service is provided by the email provider. Mozilla provide a fallback service, in case your email provider hasn't set one up. So just pick an email provider in the country of your choice.
The way it currently works is that when you want to log in, a pop-up window from persona.org is opened. This would make Persona able to collect data (which I don't think they're doing, but NSA could force them to).
> As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is required
I'm not an expert on the inner workings of Persona, but with the way Persona currently works it actually does fetch JS from the Persona servers on each page load. Try logging in on http://personaexamples.workhere.io/ and reload the page a couple of times while checking in Firebug / Chrome Developer Tools which JS files are loaded.
You can self-host the js files wherever you like. It's not recommended that you do because Persona is still evolving. However the point is that the protocol is completely decentralized.
> You can self-host the js files wherever you like
Sure, but those files would still open the persona.org pop-up, AFAIK (until Persona has been implemented directly in the browser). So until then persona.org could theoretically gather data.
Firefox OS includes pseudo-native implementation, with some work still getting farmed out to persona.org. Ozten and Jedp are working on the beginnings of truly native support in desktop Firefox. We've held off on pushing too far in that direction while we toyed with the API and data formats, but things seem to be shaping up.
The way it currently works is that when you want to log in, a pop-up window from persona.org is opened. This would make Persona able to collect data (which I don't think they're doing, but NSA could force them to).
> As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is required
I'm not an expert on the inner workings of Persona, but with the way Persona currently works it actually does fetch JS from the Persona servers on each page load. Try logging in on http://personaexamples.workhere.io/ and reload the page a couple of times while checking in Firebug / Chrome Developer Tools which JS files are loaded.