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Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic | Mozilla says it deleted promise because "sale of data" is defined broadly (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

306 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Son of a bitch I just got back into Firefox.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

please pay me if you want to sell my data. At the end of the day I am a business and need to cover operating cost.

Is there an open source tool to generate fake user activity data for Firefox to consume?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Don't collect anything on your own and don't sell the things you don't collect. Bam, problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

At least Ecosia plants trees, and the way those trees produce oxygen and absorb CO2 is a benefit to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Which jurisdictions? What kind of broad way? Give one example please. I dare you.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Several questions:

How are they getting our data?
What is the nature of the data?
Can we do anything in about:config?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

so is this them trying to protect its users while adding nuance for the sake of legal protections, or is this them pretending to do that in order to profit off its users?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

palemoon is just firefox from the pre quantum days before the webextension enshittification and all they need is a decent mobile app and their own sync

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (8 children)

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.

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