Mozilla says it deleted promise because “sale of data” is defined broadly.

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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • TurtleMelon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    4·
    2 days ago

    Made the switch to Fennec and IceRaven on Android, and Zen on my Linux desktop, which also has Windows and Mac versions. Sure, they’re forks of Firefox, but they are not subject to the same TOS. I used to use LibreWolf on my desktop but ended up having too many issues with it. Lots of crashing and instablility that regular Firefox just didn’t have.

    Another great tool for unGoogled Android users is FFUpdater. It will handle updating of many open source (not just Firefox-based) browsers. You could also use something like Obtanium for something less browser-specific.

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    80·
    3 days ago

    Never have, never will.

    So, here’s the funny thing about “never will”. It’s not a promise you can go back on. “Never will” means “forever won’t”.

    Changing that language is a breech of trust. Getting all “nuanced” and weasel-wordy about it doesn’t change that.

    Folks should start looking into whether the previous promise is legally binding in any way, and start preparing for a class action suit if it is. Because Mozilla’s better dead than it is as zombie smoke screen for this horse shit.

      • lemminator@lemmy.todayEnglish
        14·
        3 days ago

        That doesn’t detract from OP’s point. I want Mozilla to be a good, privacy respecting organization, but they aren’t anymore, and chromium has nothing to do with that.

      • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        They’ve been hiding behind that excuse for a decade now. How far do they get to take it? How far do they get to go before we’re “allowed” to tell them to eat shit?

      • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        If Firefox disappears. Mozilla isn’t Firefox, it’s the organization staffed with ad-tech and McKinsey ghouls and paid by Google to kill Firefox.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      7·
      3 days ago

      It seems like the issue here is, users want to be spoken to in colloquial language they understand, but any document a legal entity produces MUST be in unambiguous “legal” language.

      So unless there’s a way to write a separate “unofficial FAQ” with what they want to say, they are limited to what they legally have to say.

      And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now they need to create a formal document specifying in the best legalese exactly what they mean when they say they “will never sell your data”, because if there’s any ambiguity around it, then customers deserve for them to disambiguate. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going read as quick and catchy as an ambiguous statement.

      • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        the issue here is

        The issue is Mozilla’s McKinsey CEO has decided to break the promise not to sell personal data.

    • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      The equally hilarious thing is that currently they have the “never will” promise in the same codebase as the “definitely will” gated by a “TOU” flag, showing intent to violate the promise.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    46·
    3 days ago

    We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we’ve run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can’t tell how much of yours is in the jar.

      • kbal@fedia.io
        12·
        3 days ago

        Indeed, fingerprinting. Preventing it is one thing Mozilla could be working on. Going all-out on it really, devoting significant engineering resources to making their browser fingerprinting resistance bulletproof. Reworking every js api with defence against adversarial use of it in mind. If they’re really that desperate for cash they could sell it as a premium feature for a modest subscription fee, although obviously it’d be available free of charge for those willing to get their Firefox builds from someone other than Mozilla.

    • kbal@fedia.io
      12·
      3 days ago

      Don’t panic, though! Much like the competition does, while we sell your data we’ll tell you all about how we respect your privacy so much more than the competition does. It’s for the best. Driving away all its users is the only way to make Firefox commercially viable. That’s just how capitalism works.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    37·
    3 days ago

    Fuck’s sake, might as well be a warrant canary.

    And they’re peddling the myth of anonymous data. Great.

    Are any of those independent browser projects functional yet?

    Konqueror, which is Webkit, is still actively developed, though less feature-rich than more popular browsers.

  • nocteb@feddit.org
    30·
    3 days ago

    So since their actions can be considered “sale of data”, they are breaking their promise which stated that they will never do that. Got it!

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    26·
    3 days ago

    You know, at least it’s not Brave, throwing in cryptomining bs, getting caught selling data without telling anyone, or using the profits to push COVID conspiracy theories and anti-LGBT activism, or getting their funding directly from Founders Fund (Peter Thiel).

    • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
      4·
      2 days ago

      What do you mean? Firefox alternatives in Debian/Debian-based repos? Or just an alternative for apt in general (in which case, I think you’ve replied to the wrong post)?

      • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yes, I’m asking for the best Firefox alternative thats available on Debian or debian-based distos. Only considering packages in the official Debian apt repos

        • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
          6·
          2 days ago

          There isn’t a browser suitable to replace Firefox in the official Debian apt repos.

          However, as far as I can tell, Mozilla’s recent Terms of Use apply only to the Firefox builds downloaded from Mozilla, not to the built-from-source versions that you get from the Debian archive using apt.

          You can use the Debian build under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. Read /usr/share/doc/firefox-esr/copyright for details.

          • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            That’s good news, but I really want Debian to make an official public statement that confirms this

        • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
          2·
          2 days ago

          I know you only want software from the official repos, but it’s really simple to add the LibreWolf repo and use that.

          Other than that, there’s not really much in the way of Firefox forks in the official repos. I believe the Debian builds have their own configurations as well, but I’m not certain. You could use other browsers (Falkon, GNOME Web, etc.), but they’re severely lacking in features.

          Off-topic, LibreWolf uses the extrepo package to add their repo which is a great third party repo management program for Debian. It’s curated by maintainers of official Debian packages and has selection of other third party repos for some popular software that either doesn’t make it into the official repos for whatever reason or aren’t kept super updated in Debian Stable.

          That and it’s so much easier than adding signing keys, messing with sources lists, etc. I wish more software used it, honestly, but the maintainers know what they’re doing.

  • teri@discuss.tchncs.de
    12·
    3 days ago

    Please panic. There’s Librewolf. A deshittified Firefox fork. Would be great to support that project.

  • mspencer712@programming.dev
    7·
    3 days ago

    I hope they explain further. Honestly I don’t think the “oh crap I need to know if it’s good or bad right now!” camp is really going to care, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. (As opposed to the “this could be either way, I don’t have enough evidence to decide right now, and I’m ok with holding that uncertainty in my brain until new evidence moves my needle” camp)

    Are forked builds possible with third party service references neutered?

    • kandykarter@lemmy.ca
      13·
      3 days ago

      Is it open source, or is it owned by a private company? Looks exactly like the kind of thing that’ll be great for a few years and then become enshittified, like all for-profit software inevitably seems to.

      • Jears@social.jears.at
        2·
        2 days ago

        Ladybird is a non profit developed by volunteers, no company.

        Project lead is Andreas Kling (you should definitely watch his development videos and streams), great guy who developed SerenityOS aswell, an operating system from scratch. For that he developed LibWeb which he then used to create Ladybird. They only recently founded a non-profit, which is probably needed as the project size grew.

    • astro_ray@piefed.socialEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      Ladybug seems to have garnered quite the attention and funding. It will probably be a great alternative for anyone looking for one. But I personally would not use it, the dev’s behaviour has made me keep my distance from the project.

  • Engywuck@lemm.ee
    5·
    3 days ago

    Mozilla’s fans ready to take the pitchforks whenever other Corps. have miniscule missteps are strangely silent today.

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    41·
    3 days ago

    Some obvious jurisdictions that come to mind, are US vs. EU:

    • US: protects “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII)
    • EU: protects “Personal Information” (PI)

    The color of your hair… is PI in the EU, it isn’t PII in the US since it’s not enough to pinpoint you as a single person.

    Under US law, a data broker can gather a bunch of “not-PII, just PI”, and refine it into profiles that can end up pinpointing single individuals.

    Under EU law, that’s illegal; no selling PI, period.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      31·
      3 days ago

      This is completely accurate, and people don’t know how non anonymous it is.

      Your hair one for example. Who cares, say you even have brunette hair, something generic. Okay, then let’s add on that you’re using an iPhone. How narrow is the search now? What state you’re in? Who owns a specific model of TV?

      I would argue that with only just a few data points you could be identified.

      And now they are taking everything you put into your browser and everything you take out. Add some AI pizazz and they’ll be able to build a pretty accurate profile about you.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    So … what is the leading alternative browser then?

    One of the reasons Firefox became so popular was that it was an alternative.

    Now that they’re drifting towards something we don’t like … what is the new alternative?