Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic
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I don't like this but it's gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
Mind you, this is just step one and other steps WILL follow. Mozilla looked at other enshittified products from large companies that make a lot of money and thought "we could have that too!"
It's a pattern I keep seeing, over and over. This is the end of Firefox as we knew it. I'm sure a good fork, run by a non profit foundation will sprout soon enough, but the name for a privacy browser won't be Firefox no more
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I use brave and librewolf, anybody know if those are still safe from this dort of thing? (Probably not I guess, so what browsers are left?)
I've been annoying people with this information:
Librewolf is mostly a autoconfig file for Firefox (which is a Firefox feature).
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/raw/branch/master/librewolf.cfg -
Stanford too
Stanford is very corporate much like their counterparts
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Been using it all day now and yeah, it’s very smooth sailing. The tweaks I made basically involved removing fingerprinting protection, which I saw people online deride as “defeating the entire purpose of Librewolf”. Well, not true anymore.
I just want manifest v3 and to not have to consent to ToS agreements implicitly allowing some suspicious organisation to harvest and sell literally any keypress I enter into the browser, which has become the de facto cross platform way to do almost everything.
Funny thing reddit uses some form fingerprint iding to ban people.
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Mozilla is trying to increase their revenue by doing everything other than improving Firefox
Enshittification
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To generalise, just as Reddit is the neolib centrist hivemind and Facebook is the conservative boomer hivemind, Lemmy is some overlap of privacy/techy/ultrapolitical groups - so whenever you get this kind of news that is ultimately pretty mild and uncontroversial to most you get lots of Lemmings buttons pushed and what seems like an oversized reaction in the comments.
Is Firefox perfect? No. Is it still the best available mainstream browser option? Yes.
And if the small groups that presently use it walk away and its tiny market share (~5%) declines to a point where Firefox becomes insolvent - well then browsers will be just a two-horse race between Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit).
Every web spec and page will be beholden to the desires of those companies - I'm sure the same Lemmings will be complaining about that too, and by then it will be too late to realize what they've lost.It was a neolib site, but it's starting to lean right wing, and soon will.be with the ranks of Facebook soon enough. The reason, they have been aggressively banning accounts as of late, and alot of its based around trump posts.
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Vs codium is a FOSS vs-code
As in Mozilla own alternative from scratch with their own independent Plugin-repository
Could be a potential money-maker
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If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
Perhaps Ladybug once it's released?
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These are two separate things. Men and women are all human beings and are OF COURSE capable of being shitty or good on the same level. But it's important to give the same opportunity to both, there's no reason one of the sexes should be discriminated against. Women are still not equal in many ways (the exact ways depending on the particular society).
They are often used as scapegoats in the CEO position, when the company gets really bad reputation. Musk being an obvious example of X, chose a woman as a human shield
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Make sense since they receive funding from Google, Google might be demanding too much or removing funding
Google can't fund firefox anymore because of the US federal courts have ruled google a monopoly.
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Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
so is this them trying to protect its users while adding nuance for the sake of legal protections, or is this them pretending to do that in order to profit off its users?
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I feel a little vindicated. I started using Firefox basically when it was first released. I migrated away from it after several years because I simply didn't like the direction that Mozilla was taking it. Decades later I see them struggling down the same inevitable path I figured they'd always head down from the beginning.
Firefox bros used to get ultra pissed at me for shitting on their browser because I just knew Mozilla would eventually fuck it all up. And here we are.
basically when it was first released
Ah, back in the Mozilla Phoenix days? Or shortly after the Firebird->Firefox rename?
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Fucking what?
What the fuck are you even talking about?
This was essentially my same reaction to that comment. All I can think is that they imagined that this post said something like "Firefox bad because DEI CEO!" and reacted without actually reading the post.
Which ... I mean, given the world we currently live in, is probably being said somewhere. But on this post, it's a HECK of a non-sequitur.
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Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn't been keeping up with Mozilla's many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you'd decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I've now moved to LibreWolf, because I don't want to support Chromium's dominance, but if that project dies out I'll jump ship. It'll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won't be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership's fault.
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Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn't been keeping up with Mozilla's many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you'd decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I've now moved to LibreWolf, because I don't want to support Chromium's dominance, but if that project dies out I'll jump ship. It'll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won't be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership's fault.
It makes me sad because I'm a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.
Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.
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If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
Any of the Firefox forks. This is Mozilla not Firefox that is making these decisions.
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Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.
I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.
This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.
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I've been annoying people with this information:
Librewolf is mostly a autoconfig file for Firefox (which is a Firefox feature).
https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/raw/branch/master/librewolf.cfgI don't get your point, are you saying that using LibreWolf will still send your personal data to Mozilla? A privacy hardened config should be enough to disable all data collection, unless there's some kind of hidden telemetry in Firefox. That'd be hard to hide considering the open source nature of Firefox.
Also, looking at the source repo, it seems like LibreWolf is not just a config file, it's also a bunch of patches to the source code, plus they do build from source and publish their own binaries. So if Mozilla does try to sneak telemetry in, the LibreWolf maintainers are well positioned to patch it out.
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Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn't say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
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I read somewhere that women CEO are often chosen when the company is declining or about to fail, as a way to take the blame off from themselves
Sex, gender, sexual orientation, skin colour are red herrings used to distract the people from the fact they have a boot on their neck. The replies to my comment are yet another evidence people are OK licking the boot as long as the party is "insert preference here".
The problem is not particular to any of the aforementioned classes, the problem is the incentive structure is broken and the fiduciary duty is enshrined in law rather than good governance and long term sustainability. Firefox is just another evidence that cheerleading for a CEO because of intrinsic characteristics is a folly.
