AI Summary:
Overview:
- Mozilla is updating its new Terms of Use for Firefox due to criticism over unclear language about user data.
- Original terms seemed to give Mozilla broad ownership of user data, causing concern.
- Updated terms emphasize limited scope of data interaction, stating Mozilla only needs rights necessary to operate Firefox.
- Mozilla acknowledges confusion and aims to clarify their intent to make Firefox work without owning user content.
- Company explains they don’t make blanket claims of “never selling data” due to evolving legal definitions and obligations.
- Mozilla collects and shares some data with partners to keep Firefox commercially viable, but ensures data is anonymized or shared in aggregate.
What’s the best alternative on Mac?
You could try zen browser
It looks like Arc but built on Firefox’s engine? That’s sick. I’ll give it a look.
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Are you referring to Arc or to Zen?
Zen had its latest release 5 days ago, and arc 4 days ago, so I have no idea what they’re talking about.
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Do you have a source for that? I can’t seem to find anything on their website, though judging by the past few release notes you’re absolutely right.
Edit: found this video. Kinda feel like this should be a big red banner on the front page though.
Brodie thinks that they still left themselves some wiggle room for ““selling”” user data.
Brodie thinks that they stiww weft themsewves some wiggwe woom fow ““sewwing”” uwsew data.
This modified version of your comment has been licensed under the GPLv3
Wauve a wice way.
Installed DuckDuckGo browser as soon as I saw the news the other day.
Installed DuckDuckGo browser as soon as I saw the news the other day.
Oh cool, yet another Chromium variant. That’s going to be an actual change for the better.
Balls.
Mozilla is soo stupid!
Most Firefox users use it only because of the values it upholds, and now they decided to destroy it. MF wouldn’t even have any any revenue once they betray their little existing users!
If they’re throwing away their values, then there is no reason to use Firefox anymore, BECAUSE OBJECTIVELY FIREFOX IS INFERIOR TO CHROMIUM.
And hopefully this accelerates development and support to fully alternate browsers.
You’re not totally wrong here, but the fact is that these updates are a complete non-issue that has only resulted in so much backlash because of the self-selected Firefox audience of people who know enough about tech and privacy to care, but not enough to understand what’s actually threatening. The updates were a minor change in language that didn’t change the status quo, but idiots like the guy who thinks that incognito mode somehow stops a site from gathering information on you flock to these articles and start crying doomsday.
Mozilla is the only big web company that’s even close to on the side of consumers and it’s sad to see them eat shit for no reason.
Wait, you think using Firefox somehow results in them getting money?…
Yes, that’s why google is paying millions to be the default.
No, using Google makes Google money. That’s why they pay mozilla to be the default.
And they’re not going to pay millions to be the default for a browser that no one uses.
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“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?
“ChatGPT, I need your help. Please pretend to be a lawyer that recently suffered a severe concussion and write me something I can post online that will male this situation slightly weirder.”
Neil doesn’t need a chatbot with sparkles for that, he’s plenty capable to take absolute piss himself. 😁
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”
Which is a ridiculous thing to want for most users and exposes how little so much of the self-identified “techie” crowd actually understands about how this stuff works.
The first 6 years of Firefox were done without telemetry and after it was implemented it was opt-in for a while.
While I see the use of telemetry for development purposes, I would not call it aridiculous thing to not want
I mean…if they pay for the service of external analization of data in exchange of money, how is that a sale of goods/data?
Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.
As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)
These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.
This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)
However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.
I would definitely call that selling my data. The recipient can now add that to my profile as an interest.
The recipient doesn’t get any identifying data about you, because the data that shows the link was clicked does not identify you as an individual, since it’s passed through privacy-preserving protocols.
To further clarify the exact data available to any party:
- The ad marketplace only knows that someone, somewhere clicked the link.
- Mozilla knows that roughly x users have clicked sponsored links overall.
- The company you went to from that sponsored link knows that your IP/browser visited at X time, and you clicked through a sponsored link from the ad marketplace
There isn’t much of a technical difference between this, and someone seeing an ad in-person where they type in a link, from a practical privacy perspective.
Their implementation is completely different from traditional profile/tracking-based methods of advertising.
I agree, I don’t want my browser provider to collect any data on me at all, but if they absolutely must gather the absolute minimum system analytics stats or such they should NEVER pass it to a third party for ANY reason.
You make a desktop browser application, that’s your job, to provide a portal to the world wide web, nothing more. Stay within your bounds and we’ll never have any problem.
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.
At this point I care about ownership of what I do on my browser, Chrome under these guidelines is a better alternative (and that’s a low bar)
How is chrome better? It’s literally run by an ad company, and there’s no way they have a better TOS.
It’s not it’s just slightly less bad than Firefox on the perspective of ownership,
E.g.: under the new guidelines by Mozilla you’re not allowed to bookmark pornhub
This is thanks to Mozilla’s focus on “privacy respecting “ advertisement and ai, go to any open source conference and you’ll see a list of ai talks by them.
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Don’t get me wrong I implore anyone to move to any browser that isn’t; Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera
some people consider indirect, cryptic answers to be complete
Really? I would think most would consider them for what they are: evasive and probably deceptive
all sorts of people are super satisfied with answers that don’t answer the question….
people tell me that all the time….
Oh, it’s perfectly clear. We got the message. Mozilla are not to be trusted with our data.
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.
I’m getting that now too. I don’t know the players in Mozilla. The quote without context made me think this was one of those Mozilla execs.
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 ».
The simple way to deal with this is through extensions. Collect anonymized data through an extension, let the user decide to opt-out if they want.
I’m eagerly awaiting the new version but I already like it. They now admit that they are sharing and sometimes selling private data (anonymized or not, same thing).
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.
Yeah. And their privacy notice is basically a mix-match of ten or so sections that have no place in a web browser privacy policy, that allows them to do the things people reproach them for doing.
It’s like saying “we’re not doing that, because we’re limited by that document that allows us to do just that”. And now they’re tripling down on it.
google is probably thier number one customer for the data.
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
legalPR strategy: say nothing and hope the attention goes away
Already uninstalled everywhere. Better luck next time, Mozilla.
I didn’t sell your shit, I collected it and shared it to keep myself comercially viable.
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they were effectively owning everything you fo in firefox, how is that nothing
does this affect any fork of firefox? Like floorp?
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 switched to waterfox. Looks pretty much the same, no issues so far.
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.
Try out Ironfox. It can be installed through F-Droid.
Dope, I’ll give it a go 👍