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Mozilla collects and shares some data with partners to keep Firefox commercially viable
How hard is it to be specific? People are concerned about this, can they not tell us the exact data they share and with whom, or is doing so going to make people more concerned so they are avoiding telling us?
They can’t be specific in the legal note because that would close their options and prevent them from auctioning off every month to the new highest bidder.
They certainly could keep a page of what they’re currently selling to whom, but even if it was innocuous (doubtful) that would again put them in the news every time they changed it.
Tried and true ~~legal~~ PR strategy: say nothing and hope the attention goes away
Too late. That wasn't a typo, Terms are going downhill from here. I'm gone.
We saw it with reddit and that place is fucked now. Seems no one can be content with their status, they all need more.
"I am doing things that are not selling your data which some people consider to be selling your data"
Why is he so cryptic? Neil, why don't you tell me what those things are and let me be the judge?
Louis Rossmann had a good video about this. Basically, California passed a law that changed what "selling your data" means, and it goes way beyond what I consider "selling your data." There's an argument here than Mozilla is largely just trying to comply with the law. Whether that's accurate remains to be seen though.
Then how about putting that in the language? "We don't sell your data, except if you're in California, because they consider x, y and z things we might actually do as selling data."
Exactly!
Hetzner kind of does this, where there's a separate EULA for US customers that lays out precisely how they're screwing you in that jurisdiction (e.g. forced arbitration). I'm not happy about that, but I appreciate having a separate, region-specific TOS.
If some wording only applies in California, state that. Or if it's due to similar laws elsewhere, then state that. And then detail which features collect data, why, what control you have, and how you can opt-out. Maybe have a separate mini-TOS/EULA for each major component that gets into details.
But just saying "you give us a license to everything you do on Firefox" may appease their legal counsel, but it doesn't appease many of their users, especially since they largely appeal to people who care about privacy.
I’m pretty sure this person is making a joke using a fake exaggerated “answer” from a corporation to highlight the absurdity of their double speak. I doubt something this insane would come from an actual spokesperson.
Some jurisdictions classify "sale" as broadly as "transfer of data to any other company, for a 'benefit' of any kind" Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as "the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue."
To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.
I think this is a reasonable explanation.
But I also believe a large part of the firefox user base does not want any data about them collected by their browser, no matter if it is for commercial purposes or simply analytics / telemetry. Which is why the original statement "we will never sell any of your data" was just good enough for them, and anything mozilla is now saying is basically not good enough, no matter how much they clarify it to mean "not selling in the colloquial sense"
That's good and I'm genuinely glad they're trying to clarify it, but it proves yet again that their top management is out of touch with reality and their users: somebody (most likely more than one person actually) had to sign off on these changes and the message they sent out - this whole thing could have been avoided if they understood their users better (and/or if they actually cared nore about what users think).
Google funding allows them to be big and inefficient, which means a lot of tops paid well and thinking themselves fashionable FOSS leader people or something.
They can live without it. They'll have to cut most of the organization and return to being an open project developing a web browser.
That doesn't sound cool for people not doing useful work. Like me, I'll get to my shit instead of typing comments.
this is them rolling it back cause of the outcry, they don't want to admit it worked
The terms were never actually bad. This is them responding to the backlash, yes, but that's just because everyone freaked out over nothing. They're not "rolling back" anything, and this comment is just more disinformation.
The proof that even techies can confuse « rollback » and « fix ».
A FOSS browser has and never will require collecting user data.
This should not happen at all.
Certain features certainly could be considered as doing that, such as:
I certainly want those. And then there are others that I don't want:
My understanding is that this change is primarily motivated by a recent law change in California that has a pretty broad definition of "selling user data" and this is less likely to be a fundamental change in how Mozilla operates. However, let's see what they come back with.
That second list should also include
Because ads in the search bar results are one of the things Mozilla cited as precipitating the need for ToS.
I didn't sell your shit, I collected it and shared it to keep myself comercially viable.
Too late, I switched to Floorp.
Because of privacy stuff? No. Because of repeated drama? Yes.
I don't have time for this stuff. I don't have time to track every minute twist of the knife that Google's funding drives Mozilla to embark on.
I'm bored of using software and watching it go through "death by a thousand minor dramas"
So now I use a web browser that has a name so stupid I don't even recommend it to other people. Brilliant.
The drama isn't exactly their fault. There are a lot of rich organizations that want them to cease to exist. Most 9f which want track you online and/or shove ads down your throat.
A fair amount of drama is exactly their fault. Mozilla chose to increase management pay and fire people, Mozilla chose to flirt with ai, Mozilla bought an ad firm, and so on. It's not like someone was holding a knife to their throat.
Floorp isn't recommended for its privacy features anyway, it's recommended by users for the amount of customization you can do. It's got some features that Firefox has that I don't want to do without.
Mozilla says that “there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners” so that Firefox can be “commercially viable,” but it adds that it spells those out in its privacy notice and works to strip data of potentially identifying information or share it in aggregate.
Sounds like they've already been selling (or trading) data and this whole debacle is a way to retroactively cover their asses.
Ruh roh. Too late though.
Friendship ended with Firefox,❎ Librewolf is my new best friend. ✅
Friendship ended with Firefox,❎ Librewolf is my new best friend. ✅
A big problem with such forks (same with packages made by Linux distributors) is that there is a delay between official FF release and the release of the corresponding update of the fork. 99% of the time this doesn't matter much but when there is a severe security issue, the patch needs to be available ASAP.
Past enshittifications of Firefox could be disabled by users. Users who know what to disable don't need such forks then.
I'm not yet clear what Mozilla even intends. Is it just an adjustment of language of things that are already in FF and can be disabled easily? If so, I just keep the following shit disabled and benefit from earlier update releases.
They have no business collecting any data in the first place. If I wanted my data collected I'd be using Chrome like everyone else. I'm not choosing to use their buggy ass inferior and slower browser for any of Mozilla's services, I'm choosing it because I want to support non-Chromium browsers and regain my privacy.
There's no point whatsoever to using Firefox if it's just a worse Chrome.
Even if Firefox is selling your data, its still 10x better than chrome since they allow uBlock Origin. Fuck chrome and fuck ads
Anyone have a decent Android alternative? Updated my phone last night and this morning got a notification that Firefox had full permissions for accessing my location data. I'd like to move away from Firefox before enshitification is in full swing.
I use Fennec
Righto, pop that on the list. Thanks 👍
Did you give it to it?
It can be a pretty nice feature for using map-based apps in the browser.
I haven't used such websites for a while and I don't see Firefox in the recent users of the location API, even though I use Firefox Android all the time. (Info available in Android under Settings/Location.)
Absolutely not. There's not a single app on my phone that I willingly give unrestricted access to my location data. At most I allow "while using the app" and have my phone set to ask for permission for background running.
