- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
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The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I’d be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
They’re cash strapped and cash strapped companies are the worst when it comes to being trustworthy. That’s all the calculus that needs to be done.
Google really needs to be broken up. They’ve become the Ma Bell of the internet.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
Hm. Reading further in the article and since its not the first no-no… I have doubts.
Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.
They should clarify that then. Explain any and all situations that could be considered “selling user data” and explain what data that consists of. Then explain how to avoid it.
That shouldn’t be hard.
Across every country they operate in, and if anyone in those countries disagrees they might sue?
Not saying Im supporting FF here but it’s not as easy as you might think if their stated reason is honest
They wouldn’t have to do every country. A single example would be helpful, for context and clarity.
If so much of what they do could be considered “selling user data,” then are they really committed to protecting your data?
This sounds like FUD to me. If they were fine with the old language for years, why change it now? Were there lawsuits or actual risks of lawsuits? Or are they inching closer to what countries consider “selling user data”?
It feels like they’re hiding something. It’s not hard to have changes specific to a region (e.g. my VPS host, Hetzner, has additional EULA terms for the US), so they could have a separate TOS for regions they haven’t vetted.
Ok so I don’t have to change browsers?
There are no alternative browsers out there. Our situation has came down to choose one of the least evil out there.
I don’t know about you but I fulfill all my e-commerce needs with Offpunk.
God, I love what people manage to create
I also love that any time someone asks if (tool) exists in non-evil form and someone says “no, not really” that you can almost guarantee someone will show up with a CLI solution that nobody wants to use because it’s a CLI solution
I don’t like this but it’s gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
Mind you, this is just step one and other steps WILL follow. Mozilla looked at other enshittified products from large companies that make a lot of money and thought “we could have that too!”
It’s a pattern I keep seeing, over and over. This is the end of Firefox as we knew it. I’m sure a good fork, run by a non profit foundation will sprout soon enough, but the name for a privacy browser won’t be Firefox no more
Maybe. I’ll certainly check out alternatives, but I’m not panicking just yet. It’s not hard to switch browsers, so I’ll just test out options while seeing how things shake out.
And what they say about being commercially viable is true, they can’t die on this hill. It means death of complete privacy either way.
Mozilla are a non profit organisation. Their recent blog post says that they will invest in advertising to increase short-term revenue that they need to “grow”. The blog goes on to talk about the increase in board members, and new leaders being added. The CEO and these new leaders are highly paid…
To me this looks bad. It looks to me that Mozilla’s new leaders have pushed out the old; and are now moving towards advertising and selling user data not because they need it to stabilise and survive, but because they need it to pay the people making the decision to burn trust and reputation. It has become a top-heavy organisation, and greed has seeped in.
A few people will be self-enriched by this, and then the orgasation will be weaker as a result.
Another decade and we’ll be back inside libraries, let’s stock up on epubs while we still have internet browsing.
If you’re going to a Chromium browser, at least go to Vivaldi since it’s a) based on Chromium not Chrome and b) not based in the US.
The only bad thing it has going for it is that it uses the Chrome web store for extensions.
VIvaldi is cool, but its not open source. If you worry about the trustworthiness of you browser, picking an open source one would be best IMO. Among the chromium-based, there are chromium itself, brave, …
I haven’t been presented with any Ts and C’s. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?
Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn’t been keeping up with Mozilla’s many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you’d decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I’ve now moved to LibreWolf, because I don’t want to support Chromium’s dominance, but if that project dies out I’ll jump ship. It’ll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won’t be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership’s fault.
Jump ship to what? It seems like going to Tor browser full time might be the answer?
I’m just not sure what the steps are from Librewolf to More private.
It makes me sad because I’m a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.
Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.
Yup. I might switch to Waterfox this weekend
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Why they need users ? If they operate Firefox by themselves why they not start paying for power usage for hosting Firefox on my machine.
My thoughts as well, there is always another option
I moved to LibreWolf a couple of months ago. I’ll move further away if I need to.
This whole thing does not matter if you are living in the US anyway become of the Third-party doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties have "no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.
We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don’t pay CEOs millions and don’t force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I’d gladly pay for Firefox that doesn’t make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL’d code that’s mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there’s projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you’re brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It’s kind of sad I don’t use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
A lot of these browsers seems to be obsessed with AI that nobody wants.
current acting CEO of Mozilla is Laura Chambers. An Australian native and has quite…interesting work history.
It’s weird isn’t it? how these same names keep coming up again and again…
Ebay, Paypal, Airbnb.
she would have likely worked with Thiel and Musk during her time there. I wonder if there’s any lingering commitment there?
As an Australian.Do not trust us when it comes to privacy, security especially in tech or the digital space.
We are not a nation descendant of ‘convicts’ but of prison guards and other colonial boot lickers.
We are US lite or US 10years ago or maybe their tearing ground. Can’t figure it out.
Yeah don’t trust us, we’ve gutted all forms of STEM that aren’t directly related to digging shit out of the ground for Gina Rinehart and co
Serious intellectual brain drain in this country now, we really are the US 10 years ago, hopefully the US explodes enough to stop all our idiots blindly following their jingoism to our doom
Yea I would say Usa stem is pretty neglected in some ways too, mostly the lack of career development in uni, sure you can find internships but those are rare and often hard to get for stem, additionally wet lab work is a must before graduation, and often times professors re refuse to even talk about it, because they have burned by flakey students. And it’s very limited space as well. Let’s not get started at the MS and PhD levels, whole another can of worms. You might have a better chance at a more prestigious university with more resources. Ever noticed the only successful stem are mostly foreign or/and rich people.
Glad you shared this. I hate to be That Tin Foil Hat Person but it seems really convenient that a Musk and Thiel tied CEO happens to take over the one browser base that isn’t Chromium just before people start moving to it for privacy in escalating numbers.
McKinsey is honestly scarier. They may not be a household name like the others, but look them up. They are frightening.
Man, this is very disappointed news. Thanks though, good to know.
McKinsey, you forgot that, whatever the fuck it is
shit no i shouldn’t pretended. i do NOT want to learn more. but yes, thanks for the link.
I’ve been “laid off” by a McKinsey sweep twice in my Silicon Valley career and both times the stated reason was basically for making working software instead of lying and scamming.
sorry i did try to pretend McKinsey doesn’t exist. First I heard of them was pete butigieg.
Look, being gay and married is the most pro family values position conceivable
Stanford too
Stanford is very corporate much like their counterparts
I don’t get how something is allowed to be labeled “free” when the terms of usage make you barter your data.
There are different kinds of free. Free beer, free speech and free weekend are three different kinds of free that software can have, but not necessarily at the same time.
I was thinking more along the lines of “install and play this free unity game while it siphons personal data off your computer and sends it back to epic servers”
They’re specifically getting something of value in return for the good or service and then claiming it’s free and that customers are not customers, merely “users.”
but all of those taste better with free beer
So sad. I have used Firefox since 2006. Today I removed it for good from all of my devices. So long old friend. I cant wait for Ladybird to release.
This is why I am an advocate for publicly-funded Internet, like how people fund NPR and BBC.
I don’t blame Firefox because at the end of the day, they are still a business and need to cover the operating cost. I blame the system that we’re in and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative.
and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative
That’s like blaming wolves for eating you when it’s winter, they are hungry and you are in the forest
We are still in a capitalistic. Money still prevails.
What operating costs? You could argue there are development costs, but development is driven by the community. The only operating costs are forced stalking behavior.
I’m sorry, but first of all Mozilla actually employs developers. And the development process isn’t just the developers’ salaries. There’s R&D, QA, management, administration, accounting. All of these cost money, and this isn’t even touching on the expenses associated with offices (electricity, general upkeep, maintenance).
Then there’s the costs associated with packaging the binaries, hosting the binaries, bandwidth…
Even if you’re giving everyone a miser’s pay, and getting cheaper unreliable hosting, it adds up
I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.
I can’t remember the details, but if I remember correctly, Firefox used to get a lot of cut from hosting Google’s ad. But Google cut that deal and Firefox lost 90% of its revenue as a result. That’s why I can’t blame Firefox for doing what they are doing at the moment.
Us users want services for free but we can’t have our cake and eat them in the current paradigm of the internet. That’s why we have to think outside the box and I advocate for a publicly funded internet. It is the same model as NPR and BBC and that is why they have little to no ads unlike private broadcasters. The same principle should be applied to the Internet if we want to keep using it for free.
