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.
That’s good and I’m genuinely glad they’re trying to clarify it, but it proves yet again that their top management is out of touch with reality and their users: somebody (most likely more than one person actually) had to sign off on these changes and the message they sent out - this whole thing could have been avoided if they understood their users better (and/or if they actually cared nore about what users think).
Google funding allows them to be big and inefficient, which means a lot of tops paid well and thinking themselves fashionable FOSS leader people or something.
They can live without it. They’ll have to cut most of the organization and return to being an open project developing a web browser.
That doesn’t sound cool for people not doing useful work. Like me, I’ll get to my shit instead of typing comments.
“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?
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.”
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”
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.
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?
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.
“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.”
Really? I would think most would consider them for what they are: evasive and probably deceptive
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.
Ruh roh. Too late though.
Friendship ended with Firefox,❎ Librewolf is my new best friend. ✅
Friendship ended with Firefox,❎ Librewolf is my new best friend. ✅
A big problem with such forks (same with packages made by Linux distributors) is that there is a delay between official FF release and the release of the corresponding update of the fork. 99% of the time this doesn’t matter much but when there is a severe security issue, the patch needs to be available ASAP.
Past enshittifications of Firefox could be disabled by users. Users who know what to disable don’t need such forks then.
I’m not yet clear what Mozilla even intends. Is it just an adjustment of language of things that are already in FF and can be disabled easily? If so, I just keep the following shit disabled and benefit from earlier update releases.
The issue is that Mozilla is actively hiding these settings. There’s one (I forgot which one) that you can’t find by searching for the title in the FF settings, you have to scroll to it yourself.
The issue is that Mozilla is actively hiding these settings.
They are under “Privacy”, just as I expected where they would.
There’s one (I forgot which one) that you can’t find by searching for the title in the FF settings, you have to scroll to it yourself.
🤷
I have not dug too deep into it for now (especially if I end up changing browser), but even with everything in the preferences disabled, examining the content of about:config gives a lot of telemetry.whatever.enabled left to true, sometimes with names that do not seem to match any option given to the user. That’s not a good look either.
A big problem with such forks (same with packages made by Linux distributors) is that there is a delay between official FF release and the release of the corresponding update of the fork.
That’s called a patched downstream, not a fork.
LibreOffice was a fork of OpenOffice. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD.
I’ve already moved most of my stuff to forks or different software altogether.
Firefox -> LibreWolf and Waterfox
Thunderbird -> Evolution
I’m still trying to decide if I want to move off k9mail on mobile to something else. I probably will but I’m not sure what at this point.
I thought Thunderbird was a separate entitiy from Mozilla these days? And K-9 isn’t owned by Thunderbird either? Am I mistaken?
My understanding is that they are all under Mozilla and they’re all in danger of the same business decisions.
If that’s not the case I’d be more than happy if someone could prove me wrong.
I need a gif where Scooby Doo removes the Librewolf logo and there’s a Firefox logo underneath.
You must recognize that there is no Librewolf without Firefox, right? In fact, Librewolf even says in their privacy policy that you should also refer to the Firefox Privacy Policy because they can’t be certain that their browser won’t ever try to send data to Mozilla.
I’m not saying this to deter you from using Librewolf. If it works for you then that’s awesome. It just made me chuckle when you said that you ended your friendship with Firefox and ran into the warm embrace of… Firefox with different default settings.
In any case, all I’m trying to communicate is that Firefox and all of its many forks are fundamentally reliant on Mozilla and its ability to continue updating Firefox. That means Mozilla needs a sustainable business model, and that we can’t all simply abandon our relationship with Mozilla for a tool that is dependent on the work that Mozilla does.
I didn’t sell your shit, I collected it and shared it to keep myself comercially viable.
