Mozilla is Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox | Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice
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Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
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librewolf on pc and ironfox on android. both forks of firefox.
Why IronFox over fennec?
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Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or "Invasion of Privacy" Policy
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It's not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
Sorry, I realized I'm using my personal jargon in public again. When I said "AI," I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I'm talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it "ML."
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Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
100%. I can't decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I'm at least open to it.
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Librewolf, Servo looks promising but is very far off and just an engine I think? Idk I keep looking at it and want it.
Servo isn't a full browser, it's a tech testbed for Mozilla to test out their various rewritten Rust components. I wish they would have promoted it to full browser status, but I think intention was always to take pieces of Servo as they were completed and drop them into Firefox.
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So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of.
You can opt out of it. You've always been able to opt out of Mozilla's telemetry. Not to mention that if you actually read the Privacy Notice, there's an entire section detailing every single piece of telemetry that Mozilla collects, and if you read the section very clearly titled "To provide AI chatbots," you'll see what's collected:
- Technical data
- Location
- Settings data
- Unique identifiers
- Interaction data
The consent required for the collection to even start:
Our lawful basis
Consent, when you choose to enable an AI Chatbot.
And links that lead to the page explaining how to turn off telemetry even if you're using the in-beta AI features.
It says they're going to collect usage data. Nothing about opting out.
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librewolf on pc and ironfox on android. both forks of firefox.
+1 for LibreWolf. Dialy driver and not looking back.
Ice Raven on Android.
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Why IronFox over fennec?
More privacy related defaults. Essentially the about:config is more or less filled out for you on Ironfox.
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+1 for LibreWolf. Dialy driver and not looking back.
Ice Raven on Android.
This is my pair as well
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Servo isn't a full browser, it's a tech testbed for Mozilla to test out their various rewritten Rust components. I wish they would have promoted it to full browser status, but I think intention was always to take pieces of Servo as they were completed and drop them into Firefox.
Damn, maybe I can't read but I didnt find that info on their page.
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Yeesh. So what's an alternative?
As I understand it, these changes don't affect browsers that use FF as a base, so Zen Browser might not be affected.
I've been trying it out this week, and it's good. And can still use all the FF extensions.
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Damn, maybe I can't read but I didnt find that info on their page.
Hmm seems like it's only partially true these days. Looking at their webpage they have a screenshot of their Wikipedia entry (why they didn't just link to it I have no idea) that provides some more up to date info. It was a testbed and they mention a project Quantum where the tech was added into Firefox's Gecko engine. In 2020 Mozilla laid off all their Servo devs and handed the project over to Linux Foundation Europe. It seems like since then they've reenvisioned the project as an embeddable rendering engine similar to WebKit or V8.
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Hmm seems like it's only partially true these days. Looking at their webpage they have a screenshot of their Wikipedia entry (why they didn't just link to it I have no idea) that provides some more up to date info. It was a testbed and they mention a project Quantum where the tech was added into Firefox's Gecko engine. In 2020 Mozilla laid off all their Servo devs and handed the project over to Linux Foundation Europe. It seems like since then they've reenvisioned the project as an embeddable rendering engine similar to WebKit or V8.
Oh, well thank you for the info. I guess its a good thing Librewolf already exists.
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It says they're going to collect usage data. Nothing about opting out.
Look at the links in my comment, and you'll see that all of the categories of telemetry data there can be opted out of with that single switch.
JFC please read the actual documents instead of going "nothing about opting out" when it's literally right there.
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I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I'd view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don't use, and thus, I simply won't use them.
This would be a problem for me if it was an "assistant" that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer "help," but it's not. It's just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you'll never have to look at it.
It's not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it's just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don't want to use it, then you ideally won't even see it open during your use of Firefox.
Please let them not ruin Firefox with some bullshit AI. I can't take much more of this, Firefox is one of the last things I have left.
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Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
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Yeesh. So what's an alternative?
LibreWolf, or if you can tolerate some breakage, PaleMoon or Basilisk (I say 'if you can tolerate some breakage' because Goanna is hard-forked from old ESR code, and PaleMoon and Basilisk are both Goanna-based).
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Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
Man all this makes me want to just use Links2 for everything and being a luddite. Complete with cabin in the woods. So frustrating.
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Yeesh. So what's an alternative?
waterfox
