TWeaK

Ahh good ol Rossmann lol. I love him but I hate watching his videos, he goes far too ranty and repeats himself, it becomes hard to extract the real points.

Case in point, the video at your timestamp starts with an After-Before-Whatever rant before getting into any of the meat XD

I think everyone is really missing the points here. It isn't just bad PR, it's so bad that it can only be intentional. They didn't just claim rights and put them back, they removed their pledges to not sell data. The conversation isn't focused on the net result, the loss of the pledge, it's diluted elsewhere.

Maybe they're selling data to governments under law? I'm sure they already have terminology that permits them to do things legally required of them (so they don't need you to give them further rights), and the general process for the tech industry is to protest against such government interference up until the point a contract is negotiated where the government pays for access. In fact, I think this is generally what's happened with other businesses when their canary statements have gone away, as was revealed in the Snowden leaks.

Yes exactly. And that is entirely right and proper.

Nothing of what Mozilla should be doing meets that definition. Even if they share data with 3rd parties to process it, and even if they pay the 3rd party for that service, they're not supposed to get something in return for providing the data. But also, providing data in such a manner does not mean they are selling it.

If they are getting something in return for providing the data, be it payment, other services or even simply a discount, then they're doing something wrong.

I don't think I said that? Consideration is any kind of payment, money or otherwise. The terminology of the law also says this, "monetary or other value consideration". A discount is not really giving money to someone, but it may be valuable consideration (if it is part of a broader deal - a shop shelf discount usually isn't).

I think you're both right here. Mozilla has been hunting for money (to keep the lights on), and in doing so diversified into many things. However, when it has come to light that some of these things are grey or even black towards their morals, the right thing to do is to stop doing it. Instead of keeping their actions in line with their morals, they're trying to change their morals to maintain their income.

Firstly, "consideration" in this context means payment. It's standard contract law terminology. What that statement means is that Mozilla can't give data to a 3rd party in exchange for a payment (money or otherwise) from the 3rd party.

Mozilla should still be able to "share" data with no value exchange, or even pay a 3rd party to process the data in some way. In the latter case, Mozilla would be giving the data freely, on top of a transaction where Mozilla provides consideration in exchange for the 3rd party's service.

The only way, as I see it, that "valuable considerstion" towards Mozilla would occur is if the 3rd party were to give a discount on their service in exchange for the right to exploit the data. Or if Mozilla otherwise straight up sold the data.

I've only just started looking into this, but I think it's all fluff. The claim is that any sharing of data could be considered a sale.

This article says that an overly generalised definition of "sale" was proposed in California law, but that language was removed before the law came into effect. The CCPA webpage also frequently talks about opting out of "sale or sharing", implying those two are different concepts. Thus Mozilla should be able to share data as needed to perform user-driven functions, while still retaining the pledge not to sell user data.

There could also be more nuance in this. Perhaps Mozilla is concerned about liability based on third party actions - if they share with a 3rd party to perform a service, but that 3rd party doesn't follow the privacy terms, then Mozilla has an increased risk of litigation.

I haven't started digging into the actual law itself yet, but the cynic in me wonders if organisations and their lawyers are looking to use this misunderstood news story as an excuse to weaken the privacy rights language. And the effect here is more significant to the user than the mild reduction in risk for Mozilla.

I don't think that's the case. This article says that an overly generalised definition of "sale" was proposed in California law, but that language was removed before the law came into effect.

Mozilla is not selling your data, yet, but they have removed their pledge to never sell data.

It's an intentional gradual change, and they're playing a sleight of hand trick getting you to talk about whether they actually are selling data right now rather than the canary dying.

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.

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.

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.

Boooo paywall.

https://archive.ph/vMfmZ