Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic
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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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
promises don't count if you delete them. everyone knows that
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Depending on how the requirement to accept the ToS is implemented, a config file might be able to disable it and any features that depend on it.
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promises don't count if you delete them. everyone knows that
"If I put my wedding ring in my pocket, it's not cheating..."
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Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression it didn't call out to mozilla servers if you didn't enable sync.
I guess Mullvad would be the next popular browser yeah?
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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'm using Fennec (based on Firefox, sans telemetry). Is there a good, reliable, and trustable way to export my bookmarks so I don't have to depend on Firefox Sync?
Edit: forgot to sqy: on Android.
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I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It's only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
Do Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?
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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.
Am I the only one here who's pretty much okay with this? I do wish they'd clarify exactly what they mean by "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about 'selling data')," but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I've used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I'm just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there's something I'm missing here though.
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Could you imagine the enshittification cries if they did this. “Mozilla to add subscription model to your browser”.
They have other products that have subscriptions you can pay for to support the company.
Instead of using Mullvad, use Mozilla VPN (it is literally exactly the same, you just pay Mozilla not Mullvad)
If you’re a web developer, Subscribe to MDN Plus.
Hate spam? Firefox Relay.
I learned more about their paid services from this one post than in the last 5 years of using their browser. Not that their browser should be constantly inundating you with ads for their other services but dang.
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Do Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?
Yes, they allow full avoidance of any potential data collection through the browser, if they remove the collection features.
Mozilla would need to change their licensing terms to prevent forks from being able to remove things like that, and forks could just use the last version of the code before the license change and just backport new features.
Also Firefox is fully open source, unlike chromium which relies on a closed source binary blob in the middle. Some chromium forks have replaced the binary blob with open source code, but the default is for chromium forks to have a nice chunk in them controlled by google that no one can deeply inveatigate what it does. Firefox does not have this issue.
Mozilla can't hide any potential data collection in Firefox due to the full open source nature (unlike chrome forks). They also can't stop fork devs from stripping out any data collection functions. And as of today, they have not introduced any data collection that is not supremely anonymized, and they have not introduced any data collection that cannot be opted out of through the browser settings (and about:config).
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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'm about to get my tattoo removed wtf
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"If I put my wedding ring in my pocket, it's not cheating..."
This kind of thinking shouldn't be acceptable from a legal standpoint. Yet the courts do nothing...
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It's because it's hard to maintain a browser. There's lots of protocols and engines and other moving pieces; I remember when web pages would render in Netscape but not Internet Explorer, for example.
We take for granted how seamless and ubiquitous the internet is, but there were lots of headaches as internet devs decided to adopt or include different users (or not).
And now, it would take a lot of effort and market upset to convince the capitalist overlords to include something new in their dev stack. The barrier to entry is monumentally high, so most people don't bother to try inventing something better.
Some people are trying: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
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I'm about to get my tattoo removed wtf
If it's really you...
Wtf?
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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.
That clarification is not making me calm
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Oh for fuck's sake!
List of Firefox alternatives:Windows/Linux/MacOS:
Android:
- DuckDuckGo? f-droid
- FOSS Browser? https://codeberg.org/Gaukler_Faun/FOSS_Browser
iOS:
??No User Tracking
We don't collect personal information from users. We don't track users. We don't sell user data. We have no affiliation with any advertising companies.
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Do Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?
In theory yes. But remember that Chrome is based on Chromium which is open source. But nobody has stepped up to do a viable hard fork to take power away from Google.
Maintaining a modern browser is a huge undertaking which is why almost nobody except Google, Mozilla, and Apple are really even trying. Even Microsoft threw in the towel.
The more bad stuff is added to Firefox the harder it will be for any forks to keep up removing it while also keeping it up to date. Will anyone step up?
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Am I the only one here who's pretty much okay with this? I do wish they'd clarify exactly what they mean by "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about 'selling data')," but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I've used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I'm just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there's something I'm missing here though.
The problem I have with this is that "anonymized" data in the past has often been trivial to de-anonymize. And if they can remove some promises now, they're going to keep going in that direction. Just like Microsoft telemetry used to be less but is getting worse and worse.
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Mozilla needs to understand that I don't want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
That's the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn't even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
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If it's really you...
Wtf?
Would you like to see my tattoo of Tom from MySpace I got on my left testicle? Hey man, in 2005 it seemed like MySpace Tom would be in our lives forever. Why WOULDN'T you get his profile picture inked into your body with needles on the most painful part of your body? It made sense in 2005!
But noooooooooo! Facebook had to be a dick. And now whenever I pull my pants down in front of some hot 20 year old with daddy issues, she's like "Is that your uncle or something?"
Meanwhile Tom sold my MySpace for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now does photography of bikini models on his yacht! While I have to explain who Tom is to Gen Z....
sigh
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I'm considering adding it to the alternatives list I posted. Can anybody else validate their privacy policy? Seemd ok but I'm a bit iffy regarding their use of telemetry. Maybe I'm overthinking it
No telemetry, allegedly.
