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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
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.
This is completely accurate, and people don’t know how non anonymous it is.
Your hair one for example. Who cares, say you even have brunette hair, something generic. Okay, then let’s add on that you’re using an iPhone. How narrow is the search now? What state you’re in? Who owns a specific model of TV?
I would argue that with only just a few data points you could be identified.
And now they are taking everything you put into your browser and everything you take out. Add some AI pizazz and they’ll be able to build a pretty accurate profile about you.
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.
You realise if Mozilla disappears there is only chromium
That doesn’t detract from OP’s point. I want Mozilla to be a good, privacy respecting organization, but they aren’t anymore, and chromium has nothing to do with that.
Gonna need a source
They’ve been hiding behind that excuse for a decade now. How far do they get to take it? How far do they get to go before we’re “allowed” to tell them to eat 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.
We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we’ve run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can’t tell how much of yours is in the jar.
Mmm… privacy jam.
While not ideal, privacy jam is better than the status quo of precise fingerprinting.
Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they’re really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it’d be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.
Don’t panic, though! Much like the competition does, while we sell your data we’ll tell you all about how we respect your privacy so much more than the competition does. It’s for the best. Driving away all its users is the only way to make Firefox commercially viable. That’s just how capitalism works.
I am looking into zen and librewolf, both are forks of Firefox tho.
Forks of Firefox is fine. Only their binary is subject to the TOS. The source code remains under MPL2
Been using Zen for a while, it’s very good
Ladybird and Servo are both in Alpha, but worth keeping an eye on.
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.
They want to intercept your searches and url entries to run them through the privacy preserving data extracting machine in order to collect data that will be sold to advertisers and used to pollute your search results and url suggestions with paid-for links. They were trying to be vague about it so that people would not understand this, and instead all they accomplished was to make people think they want to record everything you type into every web form. That’s my guess, anyway. Maybe they really do want everything.
I mean, yeah. That’s the less than optimistic guess to make. But it’s a guess, it isn’t definitive. It’d be nice to know if that’s what they’re actually doing or whether it’s just a change in language to cover their own ass. Because both are pretty common.
It already exists at least as an “experiment” but I guess now it’s nearly ready for full production use. Perhaps the new terms of use text is motivated by not enough people accepting the old merino opt-in prompt as well as wanting to get more third-parties involved in the system. More details here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/urlbar/firefox-suggest-telemetry.html
When Merino integration is enabled on the client and the user has opted in to Firefox Suggest data collection, Firefox sends everything the user types in the address bar to the Merino server.
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.
deleted by creator
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 is mostly a autoconfig file for Firefox (which is a Firefox feature). https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/raw/branch/master/librewolf.cfg I doubt implementation of terms will be optional.
Thanks!
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.
…which is Gecko, which is Mozilla.
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.
…which is Gecko, which is Mozilla.
Shouldn’t the Zen team be able to avoid sending data to Mozilla considering that FireFox is open-source and they can change the code?
Really depends on where and how the data collection is integrated.
Browser forks mostly make changes to the application UI which wraps the engine, not to the engine itself. Browser engines are these fantastically complex things, extremely difficult to keep operational and secure, which is why there aren’t many of them and why they’re all developed by large organizations. Forking the engine is basically doomed to failure for a small project because you won’t be able to keep up, you’ll be out of date in a month and drastically insecure in a year.
Very good point, hold they won’t implement this telemetry deep in the engine.
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!
Welp, back to NCSA Mosaic I guess. We never needed CSS and JS anyway, those were a huge mistake.
Heck, we should go back all the way to lynx!
So since their actions can be considered “sale of data”, they are breaking their promise which stated that they will never do that. Got it!
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.
/checks for dolphins flying out of the oceans
So long, and thanks for all the add-ons.
In seriousness, though, this doesn’t in any material way make Firefox a worse option than the other browsers with active dev teams. Avoiding Manifest V3 is alone worth the price of admission.
Maybe they should replace it with Google’s former pledge “Don’t be evil”: it’s free for the taking, nobody’s using it at the moment.
Please panic. There’s Librewolf. A deshittified Firefox fork. Would be great to support that project.
Have any of you FUD shoveling geniuses considered that this is because Firefox uses encrypted DNS by default?
Look up FOSS browser in the world that is not based on WebKit or Chromium.
Its called Ladybug. It’s not ready yet but it’s coming. It’s Firefox but with a better model for the user .
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.
Ladybug seems to have garnered quite the attention and funding. It will probably be a great alternative for anyone looking for one. But I personally would not use it, the dev’s behaviour has made me keep my distance from the project.
I hope they explain further. Honestly I don’t think the “oh crap I need to know if it’s good or bad right now!” camp is really going to care, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. (As opposed to the “this could be either way, I don’t have enough evidence to decide right now, and I’m ok with holding that uncertainty in my brain until new evidence moves my needle” camp)
Are forked builds possible with third party service references neutered?
