wtf is up with mozilla/firefox this week
Sat, Mar. 1st, 2025 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tozkaLink: distilled (Mozilla blog)
Some of these changes are weird (antithetical to Mozilla's founding principles) and people are freaking out. Basically, it sounds like they're trying to excuse themselves from originally saying they'd never sell our data, so they can sell our data. Also some strange things about not uploading adult material through their services, without defining what a service is (is a browser a service?).
Mozilla made another blog post here trying to explain:
Related links:
💻Discussion on Mastodon with iamada which breaks down the top 4 weirdest points
💻Discussion on Mastodon with sarahjamielewis and why she's ditching Firefox
💻Discussion on Hacker News
I've used Firefox since the early 2000s, so if this is really the direction they're going then that's very disappointing.
UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
We’re introducing a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time, along with an updated Privacy Notice.
Why now? Although we’ve historically relied on our open source license for Firefox and public commitments to you, we are building in a much different technology landscape today. We want to make these commitments abundantly clear and accessible.
Some of these changes are weird (antithetical to Mozilla's founding principles) and people are freaking out. Basically, it sounds like they're trying to excuse themselves from originally saying they'd never sell our data, so they can sell our data. Also some strange things about not uploading adult material through their services, without defining what a service is (is a browser a service?).
Mozilla made another blog post here trying to explain:
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Related links:
💻Discussion on Mastodon with iamada which breaks down the top 4 weirdest points
💻Discussion on Mastodon with sarahjamielewis and why she's ditching Firefox
💻Discussion on Hacker News
I've used Firefox since the early 2000s, so if this is really the direction they're going then that's very disappointing.
