this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
316 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 An archived version from January 30 says: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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[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Several questions:

  1. How are they getting our data?
  2. What is the nature of the data?
  3. Can we do anything in about:config?
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[–] Litebit@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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?

[–] Zink@programming.dev 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.

I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.

This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.

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[–] gamer@lemm.ee 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn't been keeping up with Mozilla's many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you'd decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.

I've now moved to LibreWolf, because I don't want to support Chromium's dominance, but if that project dies out I'll jump ship. It'll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won't be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership's fault.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 month ago

It makes me sad because I'm a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.

Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.

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[–] mhague@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't get how something is allowed to be labeled "free" when the terms of usage make you barter your data.

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[–] Gloria@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 month ago

[–] wall_panel_96@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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?)

[–] Ibaudia@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

Librewolf is privacy-hardened so it's probably the best option. Brave is Chromium-based. Realistically though, all web browsers come with compromises, and internet anonymity is virtually impossible without unrealistic amounts of effort.

[–] vinay_clubsall@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Someone earlier said that brave was based on chrome and when google blocked ublock origin on Chrome, it would stop working on brave too.

[–] cultsuperstar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] gamer@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Don't forget the CEO's worst crime: he's the inventor of javascript

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Also the fact that he's a rabid homophobe and transphobe.

[–] boxfulloffoxes@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago

COVID-denier, too.

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[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

~~Don’t~~ be evil

[–] Don_alForno@feddit.org 10 points 1 month ago

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

[–] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (9 children)

What's the next Android browser I'm installing fam?

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[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

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

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