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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
current acting CEO of Mozilla is Laura Chambers. An Australian native and has quite…interesting work history.
It’s weird isn’t it? how these same names keep coming up again and again…
Ebay, Paypal, Airbnb.
she would have likely worked with Thiel and Musk during her time there. I wonder if there’s any lingering commitment there?
Man, this is very disappointed news. Thanks though, good to know.
Stanford too
McKinsey, you forgot that, whatever the fuck it is
shit no i shouldn’t pretended. i do NOT want to learn more. but yes, thanks for the link.
What’s the next Android browser I’m installing fam?
I just have friends send me memes to my clamshell flip phone through SMS
beg borrow or steal android devices until you get one worth your time.
Trust me bro
Son of a bitch I just got back into Firefox.
Get in loser, we’re going to librewolf apparently. Fuck me I’ve reached the age of seeing all the things I like die. I don’t even remember a time I didn’t use Firefox. God damn it
Try LibreWolf then
I remember a time when Google wrote “Don’t be evil” all over their stuff…
dude i worked in a buncha different college libraries around the time of google’s initial ascension. Google slayed. it was awesome, in 2000.
now? google is a drippy search engine.
Gahhhh this is horrible
I spent some time switching to Librewolf this morning but at the end of the day, it having Firefox as the upstream means it’s all fragile and tenuous anyway
just uninstall firefox
Several questions:
- How are they getting our data?
- What is the nature of the data?
- Can we do anything in about:config?
How are they getting our data?
By setting up small pieces of code that trigger when you use a given feature, and send a network request to Mozilla’s servers with either a single flag set to just show a feature was used, in general, or more additional data with context (e.g. how long the text is that users are putting into their new AI sidebar feature)
What is the nature of the data?
This section of their Privacy Notice explains what categories of telemetry data they collect.
Can we do anything in about:config?
None needed. The normal settings menu has you covered. Go to
Settings>Privacy & Security>Firefox Data Collection and Use>Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
They can’t just promise they “never will” and then get rid of it. People who used the service under the original agreement should still be able to claim that benefit since it was promising to never sell it.
Mozilla is trying to increase their revenue by doing everything other than improving Firefox
Like they could also make a FOSS alternative to VS-Code but nah
That clarification is not making me calm
I’m about to get my tattoo removed wtf
Just get “RIP” tattooed under it.
If it’s really you…
Wtf?
It is lmfao it was my first one 🥲
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
For a second I thought Tom did photography and bikini models on his yacht. We’ll he probably does, but I just read your comment wrong.
I mean, he’s worth hundreds of millions, on a yacht that he owns with hotties in bikinis hoping to get discovered as their own ticket to fame from the photos being taken of their oiled up sexy bodies.
The sex was implied.
promises don’t count if you delete them. everyone knows that
“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…
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.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I told ya so? I was smarter than everyone else and figured it out first?
FF has been one of the better full-featured browsers with generous amount of add-ons/plugins. There was no reason not to use it vs some less functional browser or some corporate data miner like Chrome. It still is, however some alternatives are catching up. Time will tell how it all shakes out as far as the battle between functionality, privacy, ad- and tracking-blockers, and people willing to build and maintain free browsers and plugins.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
The first thing I said;
I feel a little vindicated.
I apologize. I literally don’t know how to make it any more clear than that.
lolololol
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.
They could make it more specific. Instead they just removed it.
I’m not trying to unilaterally defend the decision, it’s just not going to make me personally switch browsers. From what I’m hearing a lot of the viable alternatives are forks of Firefox anyway.
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.
Do you have any sources about anonymized data being easy to de-anonymize? I’ve been hearing a lot of conflicting stuff regarding the policy change so I wanna make sure the information I’m getting is accurate. But yeah if Firefox implements more anti consumer policies like this I will probably be jumping ship.
There is a Wikipedia article about what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
Thanks I’ll read up on it :)
