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Mozilla is Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox | Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

158 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.

This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.

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.

Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Get ready for ads as well

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153095625

They removed this:


            {

                "@type": "Question",

                "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?",

                "acceptedAnswer": {

                    "@type": "Answer",

                    "text": "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. "

                }

            },

[–] douglasg14b 9 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

Turns out when you gotta choose between going defunct and selling ad space, selling ad space wins.

Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it, and less money to fund it.

The majority cost of Firefox is engineering salaries.

Eventually something has to give, and this is it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it

Or, hear me out, that former donors don't trust them anymore!

But also that a lot of people don't want to donate, basically when they could only donate an immeasurably small amount, to a company whose CEO gets an unimaginably huge pay, that could be used for significantly boosting development.
Personally that's a big reason I rather want to support smaller projects, or even that of size like Bitwarden.

[–] vane 2 points 9 hours ago

Cough cough, that's true the biggest cost is salary 17,097,933. But 10 millions are paid to C-Suite and 4mil to contractors who do the job. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-foundation-form-990-public-disclosure-ty23.pdf Just look into the books.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago

Yeah but the line between them and google is not there anymore in that case