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An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#81

Post by Dylan16807 »

NullPrefix wrote: post #53
ndriscoll wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on. The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozil…

>spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers Implies that the browser is the mission, not some social cause is the mission

If they've had any non-code projects that had costs in the millions, they were catastrophic failures, so they shouldn't have had such a mission.

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#82

Post by inetknght »

chrismorgan wrote: post #70
tomxor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they would simply tell us what part of Firefox is affected by the CCPA's definition of "selling user data", there would be no room for misinterpretation and this would be over. If it's as innocent as "Firefox has to send HTTP packets to arbitrary web servers to achieve the fundamental function of loading a page" and that web server is considered 3rd party by CCPA, then everyone would understand... this is either p…

From the article: > In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. And remember, they’re citing CCPA’s definition as meaning “… in exchange for ‘monetary’ or ‘other valuable considerations’”. This is exactly what people mean by “selling”. It’s…

> Mozilla is stopping claiming they’re never selling your data because they’ve been selling your data for the last few years.

If that's true then it sounds to me like there's some liability to sue for in California courts against Mozilla. I wonder if EFF would be interested

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#83

Post by cmcaleer »

hajile wrote: post #26

In what countries is this FAQ (removed in their PR) not seen as a legally-binding contract with all current Firefox users? It seems like a very clear contractual obligation in the US. { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?", 1 "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designe…

I don’t think there is a contract here in most parts of the world. But maybe there’s an argument to be made for promissory estoppel e.g. by a company who moved from IE to Firefox based on these promises and spent $x moving to Firefox and now have to spend $x moving to something else in response to new information?

In reality there’ll probably be nothing from this, though I’d love to see companies get punished for walking back statements like these.

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#84

Post by st3fan »

wesapien wrote: post #51
hysan wrote: post #10

This pretty much confirms that this is what everyone thought the change was about. So we get clarity, but no actual change in course from Mozilla. Good. We now know very clearly where Mozilla and Firefox stand on privacy.

If one opted out of all the possible data collection and privacy related options, are they still able to collect your data? If yes, how does it work? Is this called client-side scanning?

Yes. Any software you installed including your operating system can turn evil and copy anything off your drive.

This doomsday scenario thinking really doesn’t help the discussion.

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#85

Post by cmcaleer »

soupbowl wrote: post #42
Silhouette wrote: post #23

I'm sad and disappointed that simply charging a fair price in return for offering something of value - with no other strings attached - has become so out of fashion in tech world. Almost everyone running tech businesses seems to assume that subscriptions or data capitalism are the only way to make any money these days. But I have paid for good software in the past and I know plenty of indie developers who still sell…

Mozilla can't be trusted to spend their money in a way that improves their browser or their market share. We will never know, but I think Mozilla would squander $100M/year from users. It makes me sad because I have been a fan of Mozilla and Firefox for most of my life.

> Mozilla can't be trusted

This is really just the core of it. I probably trust Mozilla about as much as I trust Google at this point. Leadership is non-existent. Mission and goal is lost. Pointless acquisitions galore. Wasting money on innumerable social programs.

They’ve been at this for maybe a decade at this point. I want to believe things will change, but…

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#86

Post by dietr1ch »

BS we're sorry you noticed announcement.

There's a few ff forks that may work for you. So far I'm quite happy with Librewolf since I migrated this morning, there's other forks that also cover Android, but there's more privacy-related research to do there as alternatives like Waterfox have past drama.

You can delete your Mozilla account here if you want to send a strong signal that privacy matters,

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-delete-my-fire...

---

I'm quite concerned about the web becoming closed at this point. Bigger websites are mostly walled gardens, there's an increasingly big amount of generated crap (even before LLMs), and on top of that Chromium is the new IE, which on it's own a bit better than before since the core is open, but still a bad cherry on top, especially since the Ad push from Google. I don't want `chrome://settings/adPrivacy` on my browser as the optimal amount of ads and tracking is zero.

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#87

Post by zamadatix »

NullPrefix wrote: post #53
ndriscoll wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on. The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozil…

>spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers Implies that the browser is the mission, not some social cause is the mission

It implies maintaining the browser would better fund the mission in the long run than selling user data to adtech now as the user count continues to decline.

Google pays Apple 18 billion dollars per year to be the default search engine on Safari. If Firefox had managed to stay just as popular imagine how much more money they'd have been making on search deals these last 5 years and how much of that could have went to whatever mission they wanted. Instead they've got a whole lot of noise adding up to about nothing for income + a much smaller search deal than they should have. That's why "having a social mission" isn't inherently the issue, it's all about the management around balancing how the investment for the social mission is done.

I think GPs numbers are off by an order of magnitude or so though. I remember reading something like Mozilla spending 200 million/year on software development (not all Firefox) so it might take 300+ million/year just on Firefox to really have a big impact from status quo. Someone with the real numbers is invited to correct me on that. Browsers have huge teams of people, even Ladybird is using large components like Skia developed by other browser teams.

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#89

Post by abdullahkhalids »

tomxor wrote: post #43
move-on-by wrote: post #4

> The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or othe…

If they would simply tell us what part of Firefox is affected by the CCPA's definition of "selling user data", there would be no room for misinterpretation and this would be over. If it's as innocent as "Firefox has to send HTTP packets to arbitrary web servers to achieve the fundamental function of loading a page" and that web server is considered 3rd party by CCPA, then everyone would understand... this is either p…

Most of what is collected is recorded in about:studies and about:telemetry. You can disable studies in Settings, and I think most of telemetry.

What is collected by telemetry is documented here for desktop [1].

[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...

Re: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tuananh wrote: post #77
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44

Hard uninstall. Can’t believe I’m mainling Kagi’s Orion browser. Yet here we are.

is it open-source? doesn't look like it. if it's not, why are you putting trust on them more than firefox?

> why are you putting trust on them more than firefox?

Literally this article. I care about my privacy more than open source. And I care about honesty above both. If open source can’t deliver, so be it.

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