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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • Zak@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Depending on how the requirement to accept the ToS is implemented, a config file might be able to disable it and any features that depend on it.

    • ded@lemy.lol
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      9 hours ago

      I doubt implementation of terms will be optional. It’s also possible to disable Tor in TBB

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 hours ago

        I doubt implementation of terms will be optional.

        You are all up and down these comments repeating this statement.

        Why?

        How exactly has Mozilla handled changes like this before that leads you to this conclusion? Do you have anything to back this up other than your own dogged insistence?

        Surely there must be something I’m missing for you to be so adamant on this point. Please enlighten me, because to my knowledge about how all this works and has worked in the past this just seems like baseless fearmongering to me.

        • ded@lemy.lol
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          7 hours ago

          Because it is fucked. Firefox is fucked. Did you read what’s going on?