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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression it didn’t call out to mozilla servers if you didn’t enable sync.
I guess Mullvad would be the next popular browser yeah?
In fact the only way to completely stop “phoning home” in Firefox is to block connections (via for example privoxy).
What? Some proof here please. Firefox is 100% open source. You can audit the entire code for this.
It’s not like chromium with the pre-compiled binary blob in the middle provided by google.
I may have missed prefs. But typically Firefox will still connect to Mozilla after config such as user.js or autoconfig.
afaict Mullvad browser doesn’t support plugins which - it does some adblock by default (more ifyou have the VPN) and so on but i gots to have my DarkViewer so it’s a sometimes browser for me atm.
It does work with Firefox plugins, there just isn’t a button to open the extension “store” in the extensions settings page like stock Firefox has. You can add them by manually going to the url though, it’s just recommended that you don’t since that increases your risk of adding a malicious plugin or being fingerprinted, etc. I still added a few plugins that I really dislike not having though, like a password manager and darkreader, just because I valued the convenience slightly more than the added security.
Nice, thanks!