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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
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…
In the US at least, the courts are seemingly bought out.
Sad it’s even acceptable.
Google really needs to be broken up. They’ve become the Ma Bell of the internet.
Mozilla needs to understand that I don’t want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
Nahhh, trust them, bro. People working on other things with the same product name as their company name were great people. That should be endorsement enough.
Wait. They have this ‘open source’ flag. If they wave it about - oooh, pretty - does that help?
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn’t even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I’d be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
I don’t like this but it’s gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
If you’re going to a Chromium browser, at least go to Vivaldi since it’s a) based on Chromium not Chrome and b) not based in the US.
The only bad thing it has going for it is that it uses the Chrome web store for extensions.
This is why I am an advocate for publicly-funded Internet, like how people fund NPR and BBC.
I don’t blame Firefox because at the end of the day, they are still a business and need to cover the operating cost. I blame the system that we’re in and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative.
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)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.
Yeah, I think it would be very fucking easy to say “we don’t sell your data” by any definition… Literally all you need to do is not fucking sell people’s data
If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
zen, ladybird, waterfox are some that i’ve heard of before. zen is out now. idk about the others. one of my friends uses zen and it’s pretty neat.
zen is still unstable. random errors and bugs show up very often
Perhaps Ladybird once it’s released?
we should all support ladybird project in hope for accelerated development. alpha in 2026, beta in 2027, stable in 2028. thats a long waiting time
Women CEOs are as shit as Male CEOs. Who would have thunk the war of the sexes was a cause dangled in front of the bougies so the elite could parasitise free from fear of popular revolt huh?
I read somewhere that women CEO are often chosen when the company is declining or about to fail, as a way to take the blame off from themselves. So your comment seems kind of misogynistic and saying women are just as bad, but you are not accounting for the misogyny in the corporate world. In many cases a male dominated BOD often use women as a scapegoat for their failings, musks twitter for example, he hides behind a woman to take criticism off himself. Women also earn significantly less than men in the same position. Another is YouTube’s Late ceo. Theranos had Holmes, but if you look further she was chosen to be the face by a male BOD
Sex, gender, sexual orientation, skin colour are red herrings used to distract the people from the fact they have a boot on their neck. The replies to my comment are yet another evidence people are OK licking the boot as long as the party is “insert preference here”. The problem is not particular to any of the aforementioned classes, the problem is the incentive structure is broken and the fiduciary duty is enshrined in law rather than good governance and long term sustainability. Firefox is just another evidence that cheerleading for a CEO because of intrinsic characteristics is a folly.
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.
To generalise, just as Reddit is the neolib centrist hivemind and Facebook is the conservative boomer hivemind, Lemmy is some overlap of privacy/techy/ultrapolitical groups - so whenever you get this kind of news that is ultimately pretty mild and uncontroversial to most you get lots of Lemmings buttons pushed and what seems like an oversized reaction in the comments.
Is Firefox perfect? No. Is it still the best available mainstream browser option? Yes. And if the small groups that presently use it walk away and its tiny market share (~5%) declines to a point where Firefox becomes insolvent - well then browsers will be just a two-horse race between Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit). Every web spec and page will be beholden to the desires of those companies - I’m sure the same Lemmings will be complaining about that too, and by then it will be too late to realize what they’ve lost.
It was a neolib site, but it’s starting to lean right wing, and soon will.be with the ranks of Facebook soon enough. The reason, they have been aggressively banning accounts as of late, and alot of its based around trump posts. They allow heavy astroturfing from the right, either from troll farms or conservative comments, you report them you will get banned. Many people criticized the site for pushing so many trump sanewashing posts in the front page, the conservative sub have been consistently in the front page for a while, before you almost never hear a peep from them, unless it’s being talked about in other subs
so long firefox👋
Where are you going?
Tor/Mullvad are the only acceptable options if you genuinely want the best for your privacy. Mullvad browser is a bit less of a hassle than Tor but not by much. If adamant about staying away from Gecko (Firefox) and Chromium browsers then WebKit forked browsers are sort of the last options.
At this point I’m beginning to look at going online as something that is inherently dangerous (for lack of a better word) and that needs to be done with care. There is no meaningful way to stay private anymore, and by connecting and interacting you are always painting a target on your back with long-lasting consequences that we can’t imagine yet. It’s not looking great right now, my dudes.
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,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don’t pay CEOs millions and don’t force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I’d gladly pay for Firefox that doesn’t make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL’d code that’s mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there’s projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you’re brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It’s kind of sad I don’t use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
So sad. I have used Firefox since 2006. Today I removed it for good from all of my devices. So long old friend. I cant wait for Ladybird to release.
what is your current open source / FOSS alternative?
zen i heard is good. probably gonna give it a try one of these days
LibreWolf on desktop and Fennec on phone.
I use brave and librewolf, anybody know if those are still safe from this dort of thing? (Probably not I guess, so what browsers are left?)
Someone earlier said that brave was based on chrome and when google blocked ublock origin on Chrome, it would stop working on brave too.
People don’t like Brave because they believe it’s a crypto scam, and the CEO is a douchebag. But Brave has said they’ll continue to support extensions regardless of Google’s change.
