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.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.
Are there any specifics about this? It all seems fairly theoretical to me. What do they [want to] do that contradicts “doesn’t sell your personal data” within the context of the fluid definition of “sell”? Do they sell my personal data or don’t they? What definitions of “sell” are relevant here?
It’s all sounding a bit Bill Clinton to me: “it depends on your definition of ‘is’.”
One thing to keep in mind is thar mozilla is now an ad company and can use this data itself for whatever advertising it wants to sell, so they dont even need a third party they can just sell targeted ads directly to companies while not technically “sharing” the info they gather to anyone.
Basically, why sell the data to other people when you can profit from using it directly?
Now that Mozilla’s fucked. What’s the next option that’s not Chromium?
- Mozilla is sliding down a slippery slope to enshitification; but they’re still near the top of that slide. The bad stuff hasn’t actually come yet. So Firefox is still top-tier in the short term.
- In the medium term, we can look towards a fork such as Librewolf or Waterfox.
- And in the long term, we’ll probably turn to a new project using Ladybird or Servo.
Which happen to remove all telemetry, ads, reporting, etc. You know, the reason we don’t want to use vanilla Firefox.
Use Librewolf. Please don’t use any damned Chromium-based trash.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
Does this actually surprise anyone?
The split between non-profit and for profit corporation and the amount the ceo earns should have warned anyone that they are not saints and will sell out their community if it makes them money.
Until now it was just smart for them to be the wolf in disguise. I guess selling the data makes them more money than keeping false front.