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
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
Mozilla says it deleted promise because “sale of data” is defined broadly.
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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It's only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
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)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won't let us lie about it.
That clarification is not making me calm
They can't just promise they "never will" and then get rid of it. People who used the service under the original agreement should still be able to claim that benefit since it was promising to never sell it.
This is why I am an advocate for publicly-funded Internet, like how people fund NPR and BBC.
I don't blame Firefox because at the end of the day, they are still a business and need to cover the operating cost. I blame the system that we're in and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative.
Google really needs to be broken up. They've become the Ma Bell of the internet.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
I don't like this but it's gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
Am I the only one here who's pretty much okay with this? I do wish they'd clarify exactly what they mean by "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about 'selling data')," but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I've used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I'm just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there's something I'm missing here though.
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now 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."
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.
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.
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?
Don’tbe evil
Which jurisdictions? What kind of broad way? Give one example please. I dare you.
Don't collect anything on your own and don't sell the things you don't collect. Bam, problem solved.
I realized mozilla is cooked a few months ago when i read this issue where it has taken them TWELVE YEARS to implement a date picker
Everything turns to shit in the end.
Trust me bro
I feel a little vindicated. I started using Firefox basically when it was first released. I migrated away from it after several years because I simply didn't like the direction that Mozilla was taking it. Decades later I see them struggling down the same inevitable path I figured they'd always head down from the beginning.
Firefox bros used to get ultra pissed at me for shitting on their browser because I just knew Mozilla would eventually fuck it all up. And here we are.
lmao another Mozilla shitshow
grabs popcorn 🍿
The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I'd be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
At least Ecosia plants trees, and the way those trees produce oxygen and absorb CO2 is a benefit to me.
I haven't been presented with any Ts and C's. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?
lolololol
