Mozilla this week asked Firefox users to abide by new Terms of Use, and updated its Privacy Notice as well as an FAQ – only to quickly issue a clarification that it isn’t actually claiming ownership of user data.

Mind you, the language of the Terms of Use document initially suggested as much:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

But Mozilla subsequently removed those terms, and insisted it was just necessary boilerplate.

Yes, because it was. Many jurisdictions are passing differing data privacy and security laws, some of which define the "sale" of data as any data ever being transferred to an entity that isn't the one you're directly interacting with. (in this case, Mozilla) Mozilla realized this could present an issue if they claimed to "never sell user data" if "sale" could be interpreted so broadly, so they removed that definitive language and instead updated their terms to clarify usage rights.

The piece of the new terms they cited literally proves my point. "as you indicate with your use of Firefox" is the part that clarifies it's only as you choose to use the information, again, because under some of these laws, using Mozilla's services to interact with the internet could be classified as Mozilla "selling" your data to the services you're interacting with through Firefox. The updated terms mean the exact same thing, but are just more clearly worded:

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.

They even updated their original blog post with a very clear disclaimer, part of which states:

Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.

They're very clearly just trying to legally clarify how they function to prevent things like frivolous lawsuits based around these newer pieces of data privacy legislation.

The insanely clickbait-y headlines around this are driving me insane with how bad faith and terribly researched they are. Even the ones, like the one above, coming out after the further clarification, just say "Mozilla has said they won't commit to a thing they can't legally commit to, but they argue this is because they can't legally commit to it" and then word the headline in such a way that it primes people to immediately assume the worst possible intent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The biggest difference I see is the tie-in to their Privacy Notice which outlines all of their disclosures for GDPR. Not including that in their original terms was a mistake.

The revised paragraph basically increases the number of details about data usage by a couple of pages, where the original version could have opened the floodgates on data privacy lawsuits because it was unintentionally vague.

Covering new privacy laws (and perception of data "sale") was important but doesn't encompass everything about the changes. For example, they still do share data. It's limited in scope, but it can still be shared. This is not immediately clear in the original or revised wording.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The boilerplate is just that, and they fixed that in the rewrite. However the real issue comes next in the article.

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.

Like

this.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Their communication of it and silence after the outrage of users is one of the worst I've ever seen if this change was a necessity. Because if it was, fucking EXPLAIN it to users. Dafuck?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It could be a classic case of intentional overreach and then backpedalling to where they wanted to be. They didn't just remove the canary statements where they plegded not to sell data, they literally gave themselves the right to sell data and then put it back on the shelf - that way you're talking about the rights being back where they belong but not noticing the dead canary.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The first part is forgiveable, accidentally including a standard phrasing.

Removing the pledge not to sell data is the canary in the coalmine dying. Time to get out.

Unfortunately there isn't a real alternative to Firefox, there are only hardened forks, but that's still not as bad as using a Chromium browser over official Chrome.