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Firefox Mozilla Privacy

Mozilla Revises Firefox's Terms of Use, Clarifies That They Don't Own Your Data (theverge.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the tangled-web dept.
"We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible," Mozilla explained Wednesday in a clarification a recent Terms of Use update. "Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."

But Friday they went further, and revised those new Terms of Use "to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data," according to a Mozilla blog post. More details from the Verge: The particular language that drew criticism was:

"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."

That language has been removed. Now, the language in the terms says:

"You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content...."

Friday's post additionally provides some context about why the company has "stepped away from making blanket claims that 'We never sell your data.'" Mozilla says that "in some places, the LEGAL definition of 'sale of data' is broad and evolving," and that "the competing interpretations of do-not-sell requirements does leave many businesses uncertain about their exact obligations and whether or not they're considered to be 'selling data.'" Mozilla says that "there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners" so that Firefox can be "commercially viable," but it adds that it spells those out in its privacy notice and works to strip data of potentially identifying information or share it in aggregate.

Mozilla Revises Firefox's Terms of Use, Clarifies That They Don't Own Your Data More | Reply

Mozilla Revises Firefox's Terms of Use, Clarifies That They Don't Own Your Data

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  • "Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox" what? why would i ever consent to that? use information i typed? wtf? are you crazy? Can anyone elaborate what exactly is sent to Mozilla? i get search and sync, but what else?

  • 100% Bull (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible," Mozilla explained Wednesday in a clarification a recent Terms of Use update. "Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox, for example.

    100% Bullshit. The "basic functionality" is to take me to the website I typed into the URL Bar and render the page. To say you need a "license" for that is beyond stupid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      100% Bullshit. The "basic functionality" is to take me to the website I typed into the URL Bar and render the page. To say you need a "license" for that is beyond stupid.

      The vast majority of users don't expect from a modern browser to have to manually type full URL addresses... they expect to be able to type terms and rely on the browser to automagically provide sensible website matches e.g. from the browser history but also from search results or other third-party service provider, e.g. shopping sites.

  • Focus on Firefox & Thunderbird (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @04:58PM (#65203933)
    Mozilla should stick to it's core business and focus on FireFox & Thunderbird. There is no reason to be wasting money on anything else.

    Being a non-profit, their ONLY goal should be ensure the future survival of it's core products. Not trying to be another startup, chasing down fever dreams of AI

    • Their core business is making money like any (cough) non-profit. How doesn't matter so long as they retain those two fig leaves which are sufficient for an uncritical and (in 2025) tiny audience.

      In this case they've millions to enjoy with no accountability thanks to corporate donors. This was inevitable and I'm surprised it took so long.

      I'd like to see Mozilla go bankrupt so it can be purged of people who strayed from the purity of the original mission, but it's too valuable for its masters to stop funding.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        It's perfectly finefor a non-profit to make a profit as long as ghe profit goes back into the org, or possibly as a donation to other non profits, as long as said profits don't go to investors/donors/owners.a non proffit is alkso perfectly within their right to employ salaried workers

        • >"It's perfectly fine for a non-profit to make a profit as long as the profit goes back into the org, or possibly as a donation to other non profits"

          That is the definition of non-profit. It isn't considered "profit" unless it is paid to investors/owners.

    • >"Mozilla should stick to it's core business and focus on FireFox & Thunderbird."

      How is clarifying their necessary TOS antithetical to that goal?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      Being a non-profit, their ONLY goal should be ensure the future survival of it's core products. Not trying to be another startup, chasing down fever dreams of AI

      Note that the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit. The Foundation fully owns the Corporation and reinvests the Corporation's profits into the Mozilla project

      As far as I understand the Corporation exists to avoid the bureaucracy imposed to non-profits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BigFire ( 13822 )
      Mozilla's primary funding source is Google. They are a controlled opposition and give Google a cover to fend off monopoly charges.

  • Not Reverted (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:13PM (#65203965)
    As pointed out elsewhere [slashdot.org], this language also disappeared:

    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.

    AFAICT we just lost this clause to sleight of hand, because all headlines will say "Mozilla Backs Down" or whatever.

    • Has anyone addressed this issue with Mozilla? Is it now a broken promise?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      "AFAICT we just lost this clause to sleight of hand, because all headlines will say "Mozilla Backs Down" or whatever."

      The REALITY of the situation is answered with a look at California laws regarding data.

      And once you read and understand that you then understand why Mozilla changed their language - because by California law, they'd been 'selling' data for years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      AFAICT we just lost this clause to sleight of hand, because all headlines will say "Mozilla Backs Down" or whatever.

      The last blog post [mozilla.org] provided in the article explains that part:

      The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

      Taking the CCPA above as example, consider what Firefox does when you search something from the address bar.

      According to their Privacy Notice [mozilla.org]:

      When you perform a search in Firefox, your search query, device data and location data will be processed by your default search engine (according to their applicable Privacy Notice) to provide your search results and search suggestions.

      Arguably "device data" and most definitely "location data" fall under personal information [ca.gov]:

      Personal information includes:
      [...]
      * location data

      So Firefox "makes available" what is considered personal information to the default search engine, which is typically Google due to a commercial agreement between Mozilla and Google. Google is clearly "another busines

  • My choice for now: keep using Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)

    by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:22PM (#65203979)

    The original ToS change was very unfortunate, and legitimately caused an outcry from our communities, with old timers threatening to move to something else. I seriously considered switching to Waterfox. Hopefully the question is resolved with this clarification. However the question remains of which gecko-based browser to use in case Firefox would take a wrong turn. Were cited: Palemoon, Zen Browser, Sea Monkey, Waterfox, Librewolf. I'd add GNU IceCat. Or, on the Blink side, Brave was cited, and I'd add ungoogled-chromium, Bromite/Cromite, Vanadium/Mulch.

    Personally I'd favour a customized Firefox patchset (Librewolf, Waterfox, IceCat) or configuration (Arkenfox) rather than a fork (Palemoon) because the state of the world is that it is right now impossible for a small group of contributors to follow the speed at which the standards need to be implemented. Palemoon can only remain very far away than a privacy focussed patchset over current Firefox.

    However, after thinking it through, I decided I would nevertheless continue using Firefox, based on this opinion:

    I think their conclusion for not recommending does have some merit. Using Librewolf adds an additional layer of trust, not only to not be malicious (which I don’t suspect they are) but to also be able to adequately fulfill what they set out to do reliably. -- https://slrpnk.net/post/173706... [slrpnk.net] (summarizing https://discuss.privacyguides.... [privacyguides.net] )

    Even if Mozilla starts moving into the same shady space as the others, their evil potential is relatively limited to what we know of e.g. Microsoft. The risk is much larger when switching to a small operation, e.g. Librewolf/Waterfox/Palemoon, where a bad actor could relatively easily infiltrate the team and take over critical parts of code review and push really nefarious code. Like what happened to the recent case of Disney engineer who downloaded code from a compromised github repo which stole session cookies and credentials https://it.slashdot.org/commen... [slashdot.org]

    With a browser a critical piece software on our computers, I personally decided to keep using Firefox; I already do mission-critical tasks on the official Firefox Mozilla binary without any add-ons, and my regular browsing on a distro packaged build with more personalization. Maybe I will also sandbox the whole browser (bubblewrap, firejail).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sirket ( 60694 )

      It's honestly amazing to me just how many people think any of these other browsers will continue to exist without Firefox. As you said- if Firefox goes away, so does every one of the derivatives.

      And most of these posts are just conspiracy nutters who have obviously never been in a room with a corporate lawyer. It doesn't matter what industry you are in or what your software does- the lawyers are going to have their say. Maybe you're small enough that no one cares what you're doing, or maybe you just don't h

    • Forking Firefox is no easy feat, since the organization's trademarks are plastered everywhere. My take is that Mozilla really went out of their way to make it as difficult as possible. I did a code comparison between PaleMoon and Firefox, and I was surprised how few technical differences there were in terms of the core engine. But, boy, it sure takes a lot of work to strip out all the authentication and telemetry nonsense.

      Patch sets sound like a good idea, but doing it legally is a real problem. It migh

    • >"The original ToS change was very unfortunate, and legitimately caused an outcry from our communities"

      Yes, but most of us knew it was just a mistake or poor wording and would be clarified. There was an unnecessary amount of ridiculous over-reaction and crazy speculation by some. Of course, nothing wrong with the community pointing out that it was a problem, but we also knew it wasn't nefarious.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Add Falkon to the list.

  • "Operate Firefox"? (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:26PM (#65203989) Journal
    I'm...deeply puzzled...on why any license or data would be needed to 'operate firefox'.

    This isn't a thin client where I'm asking Mozilla to process stuff for me and return the results; it's a local binary doing stuff in response to local inputs and the remote hosts I point it at. No licensing involved with me processing my own data; and any chatter with remote hosts would be subject to their terns. Unless they are in fact tapping the line why are they talking as though using firefox makes Mozilla Inc. a party to the data transfer?

    • > why are they talking as though

      They're lying?

      Parsimonious theory that fits the data.

      We still need to hear what they did with USAID grants.

      Floorp seems solid, though there needs to be an upstream to be a downstream.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      mozilla accounts allow you to sync data between desktop firefox and mobile firefox. they needed a license agreement to do that cleanly

    • it's a local binary doing stuff in response to local inputs and the remote hosts I point it at.

      You're deeply puzzled because you don't know the features of the software you're using or how it works? "It's like saying I'm deeply puzzled as to why cars have a neutral gear, I've never used it and can drive around without it."

      You don't use features that involve sending data to Mozilla, great, more power to you. You're unaffected. But to be deeply puzzled about how software you use works shows some startling ignorance that you should really address. You should understand what features you have on your sof

      • Stop willfully misinterpreting what FFF is saying.

        A better example is the car you bought 30 years ago, you owned it outright. Today, you buy a license to your car. There are virtually no user serviceable parts, and if you "buy" one, you've agreed that the manufacturer has, same as FF browser, has full copyrights and inspection rights to all data captured. Sexual and political preferences, credit cards, what ever happens in "your" car, they claim.

        That is excessive overreach and not required for you to operat
    • Funny, I operate many open source programs that have no such limitation. This reminds me of redhat and ubuntu.. and IBM and Microsoft ... embrace, extend..... profit?!

      These examples are no longer open source, but proprietary wrappers around open source. Superficially, they appear the same, but functionally, they are proprietary.

      Btw, has Mozilla applied these same terms to Thunderbird? Will they claim unrestricted copyrights to all your emails too ?

  • Still calling shenanigans - moved to LibreWolf (Score:3)

    by Sethra ( 55187 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:40PM (#65204003)

    The new board is doing legal dances that as far as I can tell still allows them full access to use and sell my data as they see fit.

    It was trivial to move to LibreWolf which contains no such legalese. Near as I can tell so far I'm losing nothing Firefox offered except their corporate EULA.

  • Is the "We will never sell your data" promise back? Or are the user rights still weakened?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      And "Does not give the ownership" is not worth much. You cannot give away the ownership (but an exclusive license if you want to) and they didn't claim that before. They claimed a license, so they can use your stuff.

  • They keep rewording it without being willing to just fix it properly. If anything, that just makes it way more suspicious that something is going on. I feel like something weird is going to come out that they're doing.
  • Your brand is tainted for the foreseeable future, and chances are Firefox will linger down there in a position of practical insignificance. Which is a shame, but stupid is as stupid does.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sirket ( 60694 )

      You think you're better off with Chromium browsers with Google killing off ad blocking every chance they get?

      Or what- you think there will be other Gecko based browsers if Firefox itself goes under?

      There's honestly nothing worse than internet lawyers who all think they've divined some hidden meaning and who have obviously never sat in a room with a real lawyer. Lawyers are a plague and this is exactly the sort of stupid shit that results. Politician lawyers write dumb laws that get abused by other lawyers t

      • >"You think you're better off with Chromium browsers with Google killing off ad blocking every chance they get?"

        It is far worse than just that. Google has a stranglehold on web "standards" and has, more than once, flexed its muscles to benefit itself. Using chrom*, in any flavor, is giving more power to a huge, monopolist, corporate overlord, corrupting the essence of open/collaborative actual standards, and creating an extremely dangerous engine monoculture- danger in freedom, privacy, and security.

        We

        • Hey Fellas, When I become a billionaire, I'm going to pull a Musk. I'll fork Firefox and just pay for maintenance and development from my own pocket. If you think about it, while Musk tanked the commercial value of the site, he gained enough leverage to arguably become King of America... not sure who's the King him or Trump, but he got real value out of his sunk costs. So I'll sink some costs into maintaining the codebase for Firefox...

          <mind wanders off thinking of all the babies I'll have with random ho
      • You don't get it: the problem is that Mozilla has reneged of their principles in a big way, at this point having dropped down there with the likes of Google and Microsoft - which they were always for-profit organizations, with Google's Don't Be Evil thing being nothing but a smoke screen. Mozilla should acknowledge that they are in it for the dough and that they will do whatever it takes for it, just like the other guys. You can (and should) say whatever you want about them, but Mozilla goes well beyond the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BigFire ( 13822 )
      They lost me when they decided to unperson Brandon Eich for the thought crime of exercising his constitutionally guarantee right.

  • Fear not! (Score:3)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @07:36PM (#65204139) Journal

    Once I get the TCP/IP stack done for my Digi-Comp I, I'll be creating a privacy -focused browser.

    Having a little trouble with repetitive motion disorder ATM, though.

  • Fuck it (Score:3)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @08:43PM (#65204207) Homepage

    Let's move back to Gopher

  • Ownership? (Score:3)

    by commodore73 ( 967172 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @09:07PM (#65204239)
    Ownership is not the issue, so they focus on that. Use is the issue, and they don't clearly define what that means. I've reached the point where, though I believe in open source, I'm willing to pay for privacy and security (browser, vpn, email host, etc.). But it's really hard to determine who can be trusted and who has capitulated and who has been compromised. Governments seem to be pressuring software vendors to disable security, and terms of use are meaningless to me and I think most of the planet, as I have no option to negotiate.

  • The Firefox clones have improved privacy but are always behind on security issues.

    Chrome is a privacy nightmare.

    Edge? Chrome for Microsoft.

    Safari? LOL. What a POS.

    Opera? LOL.

  • we collect and share some data with our partners" so that Firefox can be "commercially viable - how is that not selling my data? Why at all should anything I do in my browser go anywhere else than the page I intentionally visit?! Time to leave another rotten apple.

  • a group of men, some lawyers and some engineers, wrote a legalistic document which they thought was quite clear, defining the structure of a government and narrowly defining its powers, thus guaranteeing the rights of the people. It was called the Constitution of The United States. There were plenty of well-meaning folks who read it and said, essentially, "we like you and we mostly trust you, but we've seen governments before and we'd really like some further clarity explicitly listing some basic stuff this

  • We donâ(TM)t âoesellâ your data, just legally selling your data can be construed as selling your data, thatâ(TM)s all. And we donâ(TM)t collect your personal information, we legally own it in perpetuity to be used for whatever reasons we want! Donâ(TM)t download LibreWolf and slowly erode our market position
  • The basics don't change. The terms assume that we have the legal rights about everything we enter into firefox. But if you search something copyrighted by a third party, then I don't think you have the right to give them a royalty free worlwide etc. license. This is still bogus. Unless you agree not to use firefox for any term, image etc. that you don't own. It is probably difficult to phrase for them but it is not the right terms.

  • ...is utterly unsurprising. Legal perspectives on "who" is taking out actions through software say it's not the user driving the software, but the developer of said software. Between your pressing of "Enter" at the URL bar and GET / HTTP/1.1, legally sits Mozilla. Welcome to the enshittification of legal systems through lawyers fighting shitty intellectual property infringement lawsuits (thank you, copyright, patent, and IP trolls for the minefield of court precedent we've all carefully got to wade through.

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