The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:

The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.

Now it just says:

The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.

In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.

A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.

Now it simply reads:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

This is a canary statement. The removal of those statements are an indication that the ethos of the organisation has changed.

This article wasn't really clickbait, although it was a little sensationalist and hasn't demonstrated actual selling of data. However Mozilla is rightfully being grilled over this.

I'd be interested to see some sources about the sale of data being any transfer of data. That's a new one to me. A quick search yielded this article, which seems to suggest that the language was proposed in California law but then scrapped before the law came into effect.

FYI, Lemmy uses pure markdown, where you have to put > on every line to make a continuous quote.

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