Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#841

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #438
c0l0 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No better place to leave for" seems an apt way to put it. I think/fear that in the long run, there will be fewer and fewer ways to participate in activities and communities on the web on your own terms, as only a vetted, allowlisted set of client builds (that may be "open source" on the tin, but by that point it is effectively meaningless) will be able to pass CDN "anti-abuse" restrictions. It will not be a better w…

> No better place to leave for This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are "stuck" with a violent and abusive partner. The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of…

Okay. So why don't you tell us what the better choice(s) are?

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#843

Post by steveklabnik »

nindalf wrote: post #585
rectang wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You know, I was just wondering why no one has yet shaped the Rust vs C/C++ in US culture war terms. One side is clearly progressive in the sense of wanting to make changes for the sake of a better (more memory safe) future. The other side is more conservative, seeing enormous benefit in keeping the status quo unchanged. And that's before getting into the politics of the people working on the language, of which I won'…

Some people have, it’s exhausting.

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#844

Post by Y_Y »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #692
Y_Y wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of having an moral alignment covenant I think is a great one. I'm fed up of being bait-and-switched by companies that get buy-in by being open and friendly, and then later they decide to kill the golden goose. If you're committed to FOSS then commit! Make it official so that people can trust that you're not going to enshittify later.

Open AI is still technically a non-profit. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Didn't you hear? After inflation there isn't a thing to be had for the paltry sum of mere eternal vigilance.

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#846

Post by homebrewer »

bad_user wrote: post #552
closewith wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, Mozilla's ARPU was less than $5 pa. I think many of us would pay a multiple of that per annum _iff_ it went towards Firefox and not whatever project/cause of the week that Mozilla has undertaken.

You're overestimating people's willingness to pay for software when free and arguably better alternatives are available. Preferring Firefox to free Chromium alternatives requires a level of nuance and tech literacy that most people will never have, and even with that tech literacy, people may still prefer Chromium. You're basically talking about asking for donations from people that prefer to ad-block YouTube instead…

Have you not heard about how successful Thunderbird's funding campaign had been? The reasons as I see them are simple: they ask for money directly, and use it for developing a good email client, not for fighting the boogeyman of the week (and/or chasing the latest fad).

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#847

Post by ac29 »

justinclift wrote: post #531
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf. Did not know any of those alternatives thanks for sharing. After a quick online search, I see they could work for casual browsing and it's great that they don't rely on Chromium But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?

If you're on macOS, then Kagi's Orion seems good: https://kagi.com/orion It's been working fine for me anyway.

They are working on Orion for Linux this year as well

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#848

Post by GTP »

bad_user wrote: post #552
closewith wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, Mozilla's ARPU was less than $5 pa. I think many of us would pay a multiple of that per annum _iff_ it went towards Firefox and not whatever project/cause of the week that Mozilla has undertaken.

You're overestimating people's willingness to pay for software when free and arguably better alternatives are available. Preferring Firefox to free Chromium alternatives requires a level of nuance and tech literacy that most people will never have, and even with that tech literacy, people may still prefer Chromium. You're basically talking about asking for donations from people that prefer to ad-block YouTube instead…

> Preferring Firefox to free Chromium alternatives requires a level of nuance and tech literacy that most people will never have

I think it's already the case that only tech literate people prefer Firefox over Chrome or Edge (I bet a significant part of users don't even know about Chromium or what's the difference from Chrome). So putting a price on Firefox wouldn't change this in a meaningful way. The real question is how much tech literate people would be ready to pay, most of the users will stay on Chrome/Edge for the foreseeable future.

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#849

Post by Digit-Al »

Zak wrote: post #582
Digit-Al wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file…

Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs. The new terms grant Mozilla , the corporation a license to do things with my data.

My comments above are based on precedence when sites like Facebook added these clauses and people got all panicked thinking the company was going to start selling their content (rather than selling their souls /s). The mundane truth was that they needed the wording to make sure they were legally given the right to publish the content onto the web in the way they did. So people were assuming nefarious reasons when they were just legally protecting themselves.

Now, it does seem strange that Mozilla have suddenly added this when they haven't had it previously. Personally, I deem it highly unlikely that they are planning on monetizing our content in some way; whilst they have made some strange decisions sometimes I don't think they are completely stupid. Mozilla is in a precarious position right now, they are only managing to scape by on user trust and if that disappears they are finished. I'd like to think they are not foolish enough to do something that would catastrophically erode that trust, and selling user data to advertisers would kill them.

Having thought about it a bit more now, I have to wonder if they have dreamt up some other mad scheme, like Mozilla Cloud Storage, or something that would require such wording in the terms. Hopefully, it's just a wording update to protect themselves. I guess we will find out in due course.

[edit: fixed a typo.]

Re: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

#850

Post by wodenokoto »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #529
wodenokoto wrote: post #517

How does corporate promises work? Like, I used Firefox when they promised never to sell my data. So I should be grandfathered, right?

There's no such thing as a corporate promise. There are such things as legal contracts and lawsuits, neither of which likely apply to anything Mozilla says about their browser.

There’s also agreements and tos
Post reply on HN