Mozilla says its new Firefox terms don’t give it ownership of your data
Mozilla says its new Firefox terms don’t give it ownership of your data
Misunderstanding of legalese may have lead a lot of us down the wrong road.
I learned a new term today that illustrates this move. Warrant canary. When a company disappears a promise it's like a canary in a coal mine.
Many sites have done this over the years. It's called a warrant canary because in the footer, they'd say "we don't comply with law-enforcement requests" ... then comes the warrant, and the wording is removed.
I don't believe that anyone misunderstood the wording.
The problem lies within the broad meaning of the chosen words. If you are angry, you have absolutely every right to be.
Regardless of Mozilla's intent here they have made a rather large mistake in re-wording their Terms. Rather than engaging with a legal team in problematic regions; they took the lazy way out and used overbroad terms to cover their bottom.
Frequently when wording like this changes it causes companies to only be bound by weak verbal promises which oftentimes go out the door whenever an executive change takes place, or an executive feels threatened enough.
Do not be deceived; this is a downgrade of their promise. It is inevitable that the promises will be broken now that there is no fear of a lawsuit. There's nothing left to bind them to their promises.
The Mozilla foundation wasn't ever intended to remain "financially viable"; it was supposed to remain non-profit. They should be "rightsizing" and taking pay cuts instead of slipping a EULA roofie into their terms of use.
All that being said; I'm going to be watching carefully.
I still think they have time to backpedal, make it right, and clarify. I don't permit my installations to talk to their data collection services anyways; via network policies. I have no problem tightening those screws and forcefully disabling their telemetry in other ways as well.
If I have to migrate; well; I already have LibreWolf installed. I might try a few other forks next; to see which ones 'just work' with the web properly to protect my privacy while still allowing all websites to work properly as intended so long as I give that website appropriate permissions as I see fit.
Even with this change, I'm not sure their argument makes sense. What part of the CCPA's definition of "sale of data" precludes them from using it is beyond me. The definition is clear about ending with "...for monetary or other valuable consideration". So what consideration is Mozilla getting for transferring data to web servers?
I understand funding a large project like Firefox is hard. But they also have some of the most hardcore fans tech has seen. Kagi has shown that users are willing to pay (I myself use their $10/mo plan). So why can Mozilla not attempt this? A lot of us donate to Mozilla Foundation--where does that money go? How much goes to Firefox?
They do not get ownership, but a license to do what they want with it. Giving a license does not change ownership, yes they are correct with this.
Then the words need to say what they mean. At the moment they mean that Mozilla own everything.
May have, may not have.
Nope, they fucked up, I'm already gone.
Byyyyeeeeeeeee
That's not going to keep them from selling it.
Their defense is the need to keep Firefox "financially viable", but if that keeps them from being able to broadly state that they won't sell our data, it's better to use a fork that prevents Mozilla from accessing that data in the first place.
Right? The license literally says they have a right to everything - everything we do in Firefox, and that we grant them full access to it. The shit is that? I don't need a law degree to read and understand that.
No, Mozilla, you don't have permission to see everything I write and type. You don't have permission to see the images I upload or even as far as I'm concerned you don't have the rights to see what webpages I visit. The most you get is when I (used to) submit a bug report.
The browser is the fundamental most basic access to the internet. I get that there's potential for data brokering profit, but it is a slap in the face to everyone who used firefox for privacy reasons.
They're trying to backpedal now:
See, you don't need to ever sell my data - like ever. There is zero reason for a browser to sell my data. I don't care about the backpedaling.
I spent 20 years on Firefox. Through the good years and the bad, when it was slow and clunky compared to the new shiny chrome through the bad PR. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. For now I'm on Librewolf - then who knows.
I’ve been using Firefox since its inception. I just want to wait until the dust settles before I decide what to do.
Alright, seriously considering jumping ship to librewolf now. As someone relying on a Mozilla account to store and sync passwords is it still available in librewolf?
The technicality is likely that the application on your PC called Firefox is considered to be Mozilla, so of course the application needs to see everything you write