- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
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Never have, never will.
So, here’s the funny thing about “never will”. It’s not a promise you can go back on. “Never will” means “forever won’t”.
Changing that language is a breech of trust. Getting all “nuanced” and weasel-wordy about it doesn’t change that.
Folks should start looking into whether the previous promise is legally binding in any way, and start preparing for a class action suit if it is. Because Mozilla’s better dead than it is as zombie smoke screen for this horse shit.
It seems like the issue here is, users want to be spoken to in colloquial language they understand, but any document a legal entity produces MUST be in unambiguous “legal” language.
So unless there’s a way to write a separate “unofficial FAQ” with what they want to say, they are limited to what they legally have to say.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now they need to create a formal document specifying in the best legalese exactly what they mean when they say they “will never sell your data”, because if there’s any ambiguity around it, then customers deserve for them to disambiguate. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going read as quick and catchy as an ambiguous statement.
the issue here is
The issue is Mozilla’s McKinsey CEO has decided to break the promise not to sell personal data.
The equally hilarious thing is that currently they have the “never will” promise in the same codebase as the “definitely will” gated by a “TOU” flag, showing intent to violate the promise.
Some obvious jurisdictions that come to mind, are US vs. EU:
- US: protects “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII)
- EU: protects “Personal Information” (PI)
The color of your hair… is PI in the EU, it isn’t PII in the US since it’s not enough to pinpoint you as a single person.
Under US law, a data broker can gather a bunch of “not-PII, just PI”, and refine it into profiles that can end up pinpointing single individuals.
Under EU law, that’s illegal; no selling PI, period.
So … what is the leading alternative browser then?
One of the reasons Firefox became so popular was that it was an alternative.
Now that they’re drifting towards something we don’t like … what is the new alternative?
Librewolf has some trouble with some websites. For example, it won’t load one of my own that makes a GRPC request over TLS, stating that the certificate issuer is unknown despite it being the same certificate used on the accepted-as-secure page the request is made from.
Hey! Thanks for the heads up. This looks good and I’m going to try it out.
I’m trying https://zen-browser.app/ now. It’s an open source fork of Firefox. The UI is much changed: vertical tabs and workspaces. It was a bit of a shock, but it’s growing on me.
How is it with blocking ads?
It’s still Firefox, so it’s the same. I installed uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, no different there.
Awesome, appreciate the information!
Edit. Got it set up and configured. So far I’m liking it a lot.
Same, workspaces are great!
You know, at least it’s not Brave, throwing in cryptomining bs, getting caught selling data without telling anyone, or using the profits to push COVID conspiracy theories and anti-LGBT activism, or getting their funding directly from Founders Fund (Peter Thiel).
From the Mozilla forums.
I’m curious what “Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example” means. Like, is that literally just the search I type into the browser bar, or are they talking about scraping data from my browser to improve my searches the way a lot of phone apps do?
I could see some government somewhere passing a data security bill of some kind that makes rules around collecting and using data that redefines what that means in a way that includes something Firefox is already doing. I could also see them using this as a sneaky foot in the door as they plan to ramp up data profiteering like so many companies already have.
It would be nice if they’d clarify their reasoning for doing this a bit more specifically.
Think about it. Anything you type into a browser is your intellectual property, you own the copyright to it, unless you’re copying someone else’s text. In order for Mozilla to pass what you type on to any website you’re visiting, they need to “copy” that text (i.e., from the keyboard to the network).
I think this is what they’re trying to address with their legalese. It’s a pity that it has to come to this, but that’s how the legal environment is these days. They can’t afford to make expensive mistakes. Perhaps they can keep improving and clarifying the language though.
Firefox is not a legal entity needing a license. Mozilla is.
Firefox is a product, not a service.
When I write notes in a book, I do not need to give the manufacturer of that book a license for my notes. If I mail that book to a friend, I do not need to give a license for that book to the post office.
The only other software that I can think of that has taken a similar stance on TOS vs an open license is Microsoft and their VS Code product. Precompiled executables are license under a non-free (libre) license while the source code of VS Code remains under the MIT license.
The original license of Firefox MPL2 allow end users to freely use the browser, with no license needed to give to Mozilla. Thousands of open source software who all use GPL, MPL, MIT, et al. allow users to use their software however they want. The proposed TOS does not and you must abide by their Acceptable Use Policies.
Even if they require a license due to some legal reason, there is simply no reason why the license has to be a non-exclusive, perpetual license. If it really as they claim “to help you navigate the internet”, then the terms should explicitly say that, and not make it implicit.
The fact is Mozilla doesn’t need a license for me to operate Firefox locally. Any copyright claim they are making is in bad faith because anything you type into the browser would be covered under fair use. They have yet to convince me why they need a license for me to operate a browser fully locally.
The most likely reason why they are changing the license is because they want to start training AI data based on your browser habits. They may not be doing it now and they may say they have no plans to do it in the future. But the TOS, as currently written, gives them permission to do just that.
Yeah. That’s certainly a possibility. Thinking about it won’t give me the answer, though. It could be that, it could also be something else. We don’t learn the truth of what’s going on in the world by just making up a good-sounding explanation and assuming we must be right, even if that’s how people discussing things on forums largely operates.
That’s fair. But what they’ve said so far seems to strongly point at this being the reason.
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I tend to trust Mozilla (more than other browser-owning companies), but they really should just clarify exactly what they do that would be considered as sale of data in any jurisdictions.
They seem to be implying that the data is just metadata that has been abstracted for (presumably ad-targeting) commercial purposes, and there are jurisdictions that consider derived metadata as still being “user data”, but in that case just make a blog post laying out what and where you are sharing. If your “partners” are opposed to people knowing about them, or you are scared that people would not like who you’re in bed with, that is a problem.
Please panic. There’s Librewolf. A deshittified Firefox fork. Would be great to support that project.
Made the switch to Fennec and IceRaven on Android, and Zen on my Linux desktop, which also has Windows and Mac versions. Sure, they’re forks of Firefox, but they are not subject to the same TOS. I used to use LibreWolf on my desktop but ended up having too many issues with it. Lots of crashing and instablility that regular Firefox just didn’t have.
Another great tool for unGoogled Android users is FFUpdater. It will handle updating of many open source (not just Firefox-based) browsers. You could also use something like Obtanium for something less browser-specific.
Mozilla’s fans ready to take the pitchforks whenever other Corps. have miniscule missteps are strangely silent today.
Firefox Reddit sub is pretty full of outrage posts. Rightfully so.
I’ve been a long time supporter of Firefox because fuck Google and their Chromium spawns feeding their dominance, but what Mozilla is doing now, I’m planning on moving to Waterfox from the looks of it. Present on all platforms, Android, Windows and Linux, supports sync and has all the tracking and telemetry bullshit stripped out. I just wish they’d get versions up to date a bit faster, but oh well, it’s probably a small team of people doing it in their free time so I can’t complain too much.
I like Waterfox. I started using it for the JXL support. But it’s significantly more memory-leaky than the current version of Firefox, and small FOSS teams seem to think the standard amount of RAM sold in laptops today is comically low and believe we’re all hauling 64+ GB or something.
Which is better supported waterfox or librewolf ?
You just woke up, right? It’s been discussed everywhere today.
I fail to see the outrage.
There are 188 replies on the community post about it. Most are pretty outraged. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about-the-new-terms-of-use-and-updated-privacy/td-p/87735
Not enough.
It’s been 2 hours since they posted it and that post count is climbing. Yeesh.
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What do you think of duckduckgo’s browser? It’s about page seems to be on par.
also
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for “Boston”) and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user. You can remove this functionality at any time by turning off Sponsored Suggestions—more information on how to do this is available in the relevant Firefox Support page.
So, turn off Sponsored Suggestions and you’re (probably) good to go.
Good they rolled it back. Feels a bit like go for what you want and see how folks react, then have a plan for rolling it back.
You cant go back on never have never will without breaking the law. We need to get these ai tech bros out of these companies if we want them to remain good.
Look up browser called Ladybug. It is not based on either WebKit or Chromium.
It’s not ready yet but it’s coming.
Is it open source, or is it owned by a private company? Looks exactly like the kind of thing that’ll be great for a few years and then become enshittified, like all for-profit software inevitably seems to.
The ToU is in Mozilla’s Bedrock repo, but I don’t quite know what that repo does. I’m curious if Firefox forks would still be subject to it.
Have any of you FUD shoveling geniuses considered that this is because Firefox uses encrypted DNS by default?
