I don’t understand how they are supposed to “sell your data” if you just never use a Mozilla account and uncheck all the telemetry. Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source.
It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software.
Something else that needs to be understood about Mozilla: Money!
The Foundation was formed in 2003. Mitchell Baker, the first CEO, stepped aside in 2008 but stayed on as Chairperson of the foundation.
- In 2018, she got nearly $2.5million in compensation as foundation chair.
- In 2019 that rose to $3million
- In 2020, she returned as CEO and received over $3million in salary.
- In 2021 her salary was over $5.5million.
- In 2022 it reached nearly $7million.
- In 2023 it was $6million again.
Think about that for a second. Mozilla’s market share has been struggling, and their financials have been weak; but their lead person pulled in over $26 million dollars over a handful of years.
This entire activity has been a long game to extract ‘maximum shareholder value’ into Baker’s pockets.
You don’t get paid like that for nothing!
As always following the money is the most effective way to understand human behavior. Note how propaganda is allergic to following the money, i wonder why
Either bootlickers like their propaganda based on feelz as pathology or they are not properly educated on their station in life.
Hard to tell
We’re all keyboard warriors with opinions.
I’ll get downvoted to hell for this, but I honestly feel like right now it is a nothingburger.
Will I continue to keep an eye on the things they do? Yes. Does their CEOs work history bother me? Yes. Will I keep using it and just keep tabs on settings and extensions? Yes.
Maybe. Not everyone is just going to ignore this, though.
I waffle between Firefox and other browsers, depending on how tolerant I’m feeling. Not using Firefox is more work. Sometimes I’ll spend a week or two with Firefox up, but normally, I’m in Luakit.But when I hit that web site that just doesn’t work with WebKit, I hop over to FF for it. Now, with this, I’ll probably start jumping to Nyxt which - while also WebKit - seems for some reason to work with more sites. Nyxt is faster, too; luakit is really slow and has a persistent scrolling bug that drives me nuts. But Nyxt hard-hangs multiple times during each hour of its, requiring a kill -9 and restart, so … Luakit.
Like I said. It’s harder to not use Firefox. But this change in policy is enough to make me change my habits and use something else when I have issues with Luakit. Or surf. Or vimb. Or whatever I’m fancying this month. Problem is, they’re mostly WebKit, and while in grateful for it, it struggles with many web sites - and especially the JS heavy ones.
I forget why I stopped using Luakit for Qutebrowser…
Maybe I should give it a go, again; or Nyxt. I’m probably more along as a programmer for its setup to be more intuitive.
I agree if it gets bad they will just resurrect Icewessle once again.
Librewolf is basically that. It’s pretty good ngl. I don’t have to spend a half hour reconfiguring Firefox like I do in new setups.
Yeah unfortunately it’s not in the debian Repo and I don’t like adding in 3rd party repos if I can help it but thanks for the info in case I get desperate
Its available on flathub, thats arguably better than any repos
The problem is that a reduction in trust correlates to a reduction in users. A reduction in Firefox increases Chromium’s dominance on the web, which is a near monopoly already. A monopoly on web renderers in turn is bad for open web standards.
People worried about Mozilla surely won’t migrate to chrome, will they?
Of course they would. Not everyone reasonable of course, but people are terribly stupid by default, even if they somehow stumbled into Firefox for some reason before.
There are people that say stuff like “better the devil you know” or “if I compromise privacy either way, might as well use the more supported browser” or whatever rationalizations people come up with.
Nobody can fucking win with either option anymore.
So you’re disgruntled with Mozilla now, so you hop to Chrome. But you learn that Chrome has neutered the way you were once able to have dodged ads. Whoops! Now that’s a problem, in addition to knowing how data-hungry Google has been for a while.
What’re you left with? Edge? Edge has recently announced that it too neutered ad-blockers and it’s not open source and they’re just as data-hungry because now you’re dealing with Microsoft.
So now Firefox, Edge and Chrome are all off the table now because they all went the route of enshittification.
Opera? Can’t trust opera because of it’s ties to a chinese company so that’s either here or there. Chromium? Back to dealing with Google again! Brave? The CEO is an asshat, targeted ads, cryptobullshit .etc
All that we’re realistically down to is just Firefox forks. IceDragon, Weasel, LibreWolf and all of them. Plenty of options but updates and development varies.
What choice…
I’m a software developer, and understand the technicalities and options available to me. I am capable of forking Firefox and make myself a custom build with anything I don’t like stripped out. (Capable of, not wanting to.)
They removed “We don’t sell your data and we never will” from their FAQ and they added “We may sell your data” to the ToS.
I am unhappy about this change. It is a clear sign that the people in charge of Firefox want to sell user data, and that the irrecoverable enshittification path has been chosen. It means that at some point in the next few years, I can’t trust Firefox’ with my privacy. And they sure as fuck don’t have anything else going for them: The browser eats memory and freezes my camera during video conferencing, and is plain not supported in some of the software I use at work.
The rationale is probably something entirely reasonable, like “While we do not intend to sell user data, the phrasing was too vague and not helpful. What is selling, and what is user data, really?” An organization with strong privacy values would be so far from anything “bad” that the phrasing as it was would not be a problem for them.
It’s irrelevant that right now privacy settings and xyz and telmentry is clear and opt in etc. Because the point is that they are gearing up to change that. The settings will be less clear, user data will be separated into shit like “operability assistance”, “personal information”, “experience improvement metrics” with some of it enabled by default because, etc.
The rationalization they have given is that legally, they may have been seeking data all along, as some jurisdictions define it extremely loosely.
For example, if you use their translation feature, they are sending the page your looking at (data) to a third party, which provides a benefit to Mozilla. Thats technically a sale in some laws, but most would agree that is acceptable given the user asked for it to happen.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
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.”
I’m overall concerned with Mozilla, but not sure this is malicious yet. But definitely needs to be closely scrutinized.
Here’s the crux of the problem.
Mozilla went from “explicitly not malicious” to “probably not malicious yet.”
What’s next?
Yup. And it doesn’t help that they have been throwing away good will for a while now, with their crypto/AI/etc bandwagon jumping. They are still the least worst option, as I dont trust the forks either, but its getting hard to trust them.
The current intention may not be malicious, but it leaves the way open for changes that are to slip in. If they were worried about services like translation being concidered ‘sales’, which is a reasonable concern, they should have split them out of the core browser into an extension and put the ‘might sell your data’ licence on that.
Yeah, its definitely wide open for abuse now. But the California law also seems way too vague as well. What about DNS lookup? That takes a users input and transfers it to someone else, is that a “sale”? Can hardly start separating that out of the browser? Http requests? Its all users initiated, but is it a “sale” in California? Not a lawyer, haven’t a clue.
The rationalization they have given…
Anything you say after this point is irrelevant. (Nothing personal, though.)
As soon as a company has to rationalise their legal back-pedalling, it is explicit evidence that they are intending to do wrong.
This will not end well.
If the legal definition of a term has changed such that their current activities now fall under it, changing the terms of use legal document does make sense.
They are pretty clear that under California law, they are “selling” data. They have two options, keep the ToU document the same, and try meet the new laws requirements (which as I’ve said in other comments, seems impossible for a browser - not a lawyer though), or update their ToU without changing their current behaviors.
They have gone with the latter, but it does also allow them to be far more “evil”. Its definitely the first step down a bad road, time will tell if they go further.
If you want to play it safe, block their domains via pihole: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Domain_List/Mozilla_Owned
time will tell if they go further.
Having seen this FAR too often, I have a different view:
Capitalism and greed will determine when they go further.
There is no “if” about it. Mitchell Baker is in it to get rich by destroying the platform, and is sharing enough of the corpse’s leavings with others to make sure they protect her.
I’m aware that history is against them. The one thing in Firefox’s (not Mozilla) favour is that its open source. The browser and codebase will live on even if Mozilla crashes and burns.
The forks already exist, the only “moat” that Mozilla has is trust and goodwill, which they are burning rapidly.
I know that software is a very different industry, but Mountain Equipment Co-Op went through this in Canada. The end result is that the new Mountain Equipment Company is a for-profit, US-owned reseller of overseas crap, just like everyone else.
The problem I see is that browsers are still evolving significantly, and I’m worried about what will happen if Mozilla goes T-U. Sure we have the code, but will it continue to be developed after that point?
This has happened before in the software world, and its usually not a huge deal after a little bit of rockiness.
OpenOffice->LibreOffice. ddwrt->openwrt->tomato etc.
Development will continue, but maybe in a less resourced fashion.
how are they supposed to “sell your data”
First step is collecting it. Putting provisions to grab everything from the software you installed on your device and use to do everything is a good start. Second step is selling it. Data broker loves data, surprisingly. And even small, inconsequential stuff can go a long way when you can correlate with dozens, or hundreds, of data points.
if you just never use a Mozilla account
Given how it’s implemented, the data pushed inside your account may be in a safer place than what you use the browser to do daily at this point.
and uncheck all the telemetry
Funny thing. Even with everything unchecked/disabled/toggled off/whatever, there’s a handful of ping back and other small reports that are configured to go out. You can turn these off using the complete config page; the one that warns people that its dangerous and have no clear way to know what most of its options do.
Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source
If by “secretly” you mean without us knowing, it would be hard indeed, as long as people did look into the source AND the built images were faithful to the source, too. They are not doing it secretly, at least for now, anyway. That’s the point of their “privacy notice” that includes basically everything, which they then use as a safeguard saying "we can’t do shit (unless specified in the privacy notice).
It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software
The policy changes comes from Mozilla. Were written, published, and updated by Mozilla, on their blog (and legal pages). What the fuck are you talking about with Google?
Heck, if you knew 2cts about this, Google actually low-key needs Firefox to exists as a counterpoint to Chrome’s hegemony, unless they want another trial for being too good at their job.
they want another trial for being too good at their job.
that’s a cute way to describe 2 decades of anti competitive behavior that results in a de facto monopoly across various tech segments including the online browsing infrastructure.
I agree with everything else 100% though
