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Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26244492

The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:

The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.

Now it just says:

The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.

In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.

A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.

Now it simply reads:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

Again, a pledge to not sell people's data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

why aren’t they being more transparent about that?

Idk, Hanlon's Razor?

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

They have a history of really crappy communications. That, plus how much they spend on "admin" (like 30% of the org spending) tells me they could just be largely incompetent. Add to that the chaos around an interim CEO, and I think you have the recipe of epic-scale goofs.

But the opposite perspective of them trying to sneak in a shift to Mozilla's direction is certainly reasonable as well. We don't have enough info to determine which it actually is.

So yeah, I'm not saying anyone should or shouldn't trust Mozilla. I'm not going to make any rash decisions and I'll give them a chance to clarify. But maybe you don't feel comfortable with that. As Rossmann said in his video, if you want to play it safe, switch to LibreWolf, it's a drop-in replacement (can still use Firefox Sync) and isn't bound by Firefox's TOS/EULA. Maybe go as far as to self-host the Sync server (totally feasible). In fact, I'm planning to do that anyway because I like to control my data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

We don't have enough info to determine which it actually is.

And it's this that has me personally erring on the side of distrust. There's a global shift among many organizations who see value in falling in line behind various authoritarian regimes (often under the pretense of "ensuring continued operation"), and I don't have the luxury of skilled lawyers on retainer or goon squads who can fight for my rights.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

And that's totally fair. I'm lazy, so I'm going to give them a couple weeks to convince me they're not turning evil, after which I'll reconsider my options.

That said, I'll probably stick to Firefox tech though. If I switch, it'll probably be to Mullvad on desktop and IronFox on mobile, but I recently had to switch from Mull on mobile to Fennec because the dev killed the project. That kinda sucked, and I didn't notice until a month or two later, so I was unpatched for that period. I'd really like to avoid that, so I'm hesitant in switching to another. fork run by a hobbyist.