Recent and related:<p><i>Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909</a> - Feb 2025 (1060 comments)
> 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.”<p>THANK YOU California for this definition of selling data, which is accurate, and representative of what people think of when discussions of selling data come up.<p>> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners<p>Ok, so that’s pretty straightforward. According to CA and other states Mozilla is collecting and selling your data. Which is exactly what everyone is upset about and means exactly what everyone thought it meant.
It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0]<p>It may also be relevant that Meta is recently upsetting people in Europe for tracking and targeting people in spite of Europe's data protection rules [1].<p>My guess (and this is just speculation at this point) is that Meta and Mozilla think they're being clever and getting away with some "private" ad tracking and are underestimating how much damage they're doing to Mozilla's reputation.<p>I doubt the Anonym tech has been built into Firefox yet, but it's clear that the corporate strategic direction is to bet on some concept of "acceptable ads" like Google did in the 90s.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-a-privacy-tech-startup-founded-by-two-top-former-meta-execs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/digital-rights-activists-file-complaints-europe-over-metas-targeted-ads-2025-02-27/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/digital-rights-activists-...</a>
> 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).<p>But if the data was fully stripped of potentially identifying information, then it should not count as "personal information" under the California Consumer Privacy Act, therefore it should not trigger the "sale of personal information" requirement, <i>regardless</i> of how it's transmitted or what kind of compensation is involved.<p>The CCPA defines "personal information" as follows:<p>> “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.<p>(It also includes a list of examples [1], but the examples are conditional on the same "linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household" requirement.)<p>So, which is it? Is the data deidentified or is it not?<p>Is Mozilla just trying to reduce risk in case someone argues their deidentification isn't good enough? If so, I'd call that a cowardly move.<p>[1] <a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB874" rel="nofollow">https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...</a>
> 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.<p>You don't need a license for data you never see. When I use Firefox to type a comment on HN, that comment goes from me to HN. It doesn't go to Mozilla. Mozilla does not need a license. (And no, Firefox doesn't need a license either, because licenses are granted to people and organizations, not software.)<p>The only possible reason for <i>Mozilla</i> to need a license to the data I type into Firefox is if Mozilla <i>intends</i> to have Firefox send that data to them.
While I agree with folks that this is a step backwards in privacy, I think it’s a good exercise to zoom out and understand Firefox’s position.<p>The browser market is highly competitive, and Mozilla’s competitors have orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal. As we all know Firefox’s market share has been dropping over the past years and unfortunately the revenue supporting all of Mozilla comes predominantly from their Google deal (which itself has been risked by the ongoing case against Google)<p>Unfortunately as well - unfortunate for Mozilla, but fortunate for its mission and users :) - the Mozilla corporation is wholly owned by the foundation, so there is no easy way to raise funds (donations amount to so little compared to its Google revenue). Given no access to traditional fundraising, Mozilla has limited options on sustaining its business.<p>All this is to say, Mozilla seems to be trying to diversify its revenue hard, and its previous on-brand attempts (Firefox OS, VPN, etc) haven’t yielded the return they expected from them, so I’m not surprised Mozilla is trying to make money off of ads and selling data. I disable data collection, though if it came to it, I trust Mozilla a tad bit more than its competitors to protect my data - initiatives like ohttp give me a sign that at least they’re trying
> It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.<p>I really struggle to understand what legal team believes this language is necessary in downloaded software. There is a lot of precedent for this kind of language in online hosted services, but not downloaded software.<p>> This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.<p>Yes, it’s a license. Nothing changes. There is no ambiguity about ownership in a perpetual nonexclusive worldwide license, but this doesn’t explain why this license is suddenly necessary now and wasn’t before.<p>Clearly the legal team at Mozilla is struggling with multiple issues in this update. Why are these changes being made now, and what is driving them?<p>Others have discussed the data sale issue, but I don’t see a reasonable explanation for the license issue, and the changing text doesn’t inspire confidence.
While this is confirming that Mozilla is already outright selling data, it at least DOES provide clarity on the issues around the acceptible use policy.<p>That language had been so broad that it forbade most use of the browser. For example, "send unsolicited communications" so no filing a bug report. "Deceive, mislead" so no playing Among Us. "Sell, purchase, or advertise illegal or controlled products or services" so no online refils of your antimigraine medication lasmiditan or your epilepsy medication (pregabalin) which are schedule V. "Collect or harvest personally identifiable information without permission. This includes, but is not limited to, account names and email addresses" so no browsing any forum where a username is displayed to you. And of course "access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence" that rules out watching the nightly news, stream PG-13 and R movies, to watch classic Looney Tunes cartoons, to play Fortnight, and on and on.
At this point, I believe, it's important to accelerate development of Servo[1], which not only provides better browser security because of memory safety (getting rid of the stupid mistakes like OOB access or UAF), but is also managed[2] by Linux Foundation Europe[3], which gives more hope from the privacy standpoint.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo">https://github.com/servo/servo</a><p>[2] <a href="https://servo.org/about/" rel="nofollow">https://servo.org/about/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://linuxfoundation.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://linuxfoundation.eu/</a>
Is Google paying Mozilla to sabotage themselves?<p>Stay in business, so monopoly arguments can be brushed aside.<p>But slowly erode privacy on the internet. And slowly lose user base.
I use Firefox Nightly on Android, and originally had location sharing on for the handful of websites where I'm fine with sharing it. But today, my phone notified me that Nightly updated what it does with location data on the play store to include using location for marketing or advertising purposes.<p>Changed it to ask every time instantly, and I'm not going to be giving Mozilla nearly as much trust ever again.
I get that people are hung up on the "licensing" clause, but for me it is not the most egregious part. They say elsewhere,<p>> Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore.<p>This is a direct contradiction of Freedom 0, and is at best a meaningless clause (very bad in a ToS) and at worst a reframing of Firefox to be non-free, either by casting it as a service or something else.
How many times have we seen this ploy? First you have a nice policy, then you change it to something <i>extreme</i> that causes outrage, then you walk back most of the change saying you had legal or whatever baloney reasons to make the change in the first place and somehow couldn't wordsmith the language well enough the first time.<p>I don't buy it. I hope some day business schools begin teaching that this ploy is a very bad idea. And if this really is the corporate lawyers being greatly insensitive then force PR and others to review every change they make to any policies that could destroy the company.
I find it interesting that Mozilla actually believes that everyone of their users are idiots.<p>Going from "We never sell your data" to whatever those weaseling paragraphs attempt to say, is quite obvious that the users are going to be the product.
And it would be better if they'd be straight about it.<p>I wish they'd rather say "pay us $100 a year, and you'll get a modern browser on all platform that will stop ads and make tracking difficult".
> It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.<p>Do I understand it correctly that they can now use everything I read or type in the browser as they please, including for AI training?<p>Considering that I do most of my work in webbased enail, issue tracker and other internal tools, this sounds like a direct violation of my NDA.
>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<p>Mozilla should commit to stop doing anything like that. Then we can have a nice clear Terms of Use that promises to not sell data. I think that would alleviate community concerns.
Submitted and helped with debugging my first bug report to Ladybird browser today. Starting to use it with as many sites as possible. I really hope it can grow to replace Firefox
They believed we misunderstood and they were very much wrong. We know what you're trying to achieve and we're telling you not to do it. I have already cancelled my existing Mozilla subscriptions and am actively looking towards alternatives that either respect my privacy better (seems like Waterfox or Ladybird are the candidates), or remain as bad for privacy as Mozilla but provide more functionality than Firefox (Vivaldi, Brave).
The one thing I haven't seen in any of these threads is where privacy-conscious users are supposed to go now. Are there any viable alternatives to Firefox?
Does this new TOS also apply to Firefox as distributed in Linux distributions?<p>Will Debian's default browser get switched out for LibreWolf?<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DefaultWebBrowser" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/DefaultWebBrowser</a>
Some higher ups at Mozilla have realised an <i>opportunity</i> to train an AI on user data. Theft of user data at this unprecedented scale will be covered by the fig leaf of ToS, at least it's their plan. They really belong to prison, but the gov is knee deep in the same business, and so it's not going to do anything about it.
> "<i>...for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox</i>"<p>I'm still confused about the scope of what this means. Is this post I'm writing now considered "content I input in Firefox"? If I upload an image to my own website, is that content I input in Firefox?<p>From my perspective, I'm not submitting anything "to Firefox", I'm submitting the content to remote servers and websites. I don't use Firefox cloud services or bookmarks or Mozilla account or anything. Even my bookmarks, I use raindrop.io at the moment.
Firefox should make it clear that Firefox (browser) will not collect, transmit, nor sell user data beyond what is technically required for interaction between the browser and other computers over networks.<p>Anything less and people stop using Firefox.<p>If other Mozilla services need broader terms, those should be separate.
and they continue to dig themselves a bigger hole<p>"we are selling your data, not necessarily anonymised, even though a month ago we had a text on our website said we NEVER would"
How do you turn off getting your search history sold? You can turn off seeing the suggestions. Can you request they don't sell it though? The company they sell your search profile to could then sell that to someone else.
In what countries is this FAQ (removed in their PR) not seen as a legally-binding contract with all current Firefox users? It seems like a very clear contractual obligation in the US.<p><pre><code> {
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?", 1
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "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. " 9+
}
},</code></pre>
Don't care, already moved on and happy with Librewolf (<a href="https://librewolf.net/" rel="nofollow">https://librewolf.net/</a>)
I'm just curious if it is possible that some former/current employees in Mozilla can just form an org, say they will maintain a fork of Firefox, and accept donation from the users that were pissed and maybe apply for some funding from EU NGI?
Each update from Mozilla about this issue has Mozilla claiming users are confused (which may be true; I don't follow the larger social media ecosystem), then doubling down on the part I'm personally concerned about.<p>I'm worried that Mozilla is asserting it needs a license for the information input into Firefox for Firefox to do it's job, since that's factually untrue. So either Mozilla is genuinely confused about this point, which I find unlikely, or they have some ulterior motive. I can't say with any confidence <i>what</i> the ulterior motive is, but I can be pretty sure there <i>is</i> one, and that worries me about the future of the browser landscape.
> we’ve removed the reference to the Acceptable Use Policy because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity.<p>Weak sauce. Mozilla ought to be apologising here, not blaming its community for being upset at Mozilla's efforts to impose restrictions on its binaries that are in direct conflict with the core principles of Free and Open Source software.<p>We were discussing this yesterday. [0] It's not 'confusion'. We saw what they were up to, and we weren't happy about it.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207456">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207456</a>
Seems a bit weasle-y. How hard is it to be straightforward?<p>I don't mind Firefox doing what it needs to to fund itself. I do mind when it seems like they try to hide what specifically that is. Saying that some places define "sell" as more broad than what you think of is a total cop-out.<p>Just put up a page that describes every single thing that is taken from the browser for revenue purposes. Maybe it's reasonable, maybe it's not, but it seems like everyone is defaulting to unreasonabl, so..
Curious what people would see as the longterm future of Firefox in the ideal world. Just being privacy focused isn't enough especially for the layperson, it needs some actual benefits like being faster or at least as fast, plus mindshare from developers... but it seems impossible to compete with Google's resources on any of that. Even if Firefox committed the resources to come ahead for a moment Google could just match it easily, in addition to building better dev tooling, etc.<p>That being said I'm surprised they dropped the Servo project, it seemed like a step in the right direction?<p>I actually think working adblockers is a great pitch, not sure what sites specifically the Manifest v2 version of uBlock Origin doesn't work on, but "download Firefox to watch ad-free YouTube" is a great pitch to convince people to use it. Sucks that Apple limited custom browser engines on iOS to just the EU, otherwise Mozilla could focus on full-fledged extension parity on iOS and the pitch would be to get sync + ad-free.
From the page:<p>> <i>TL;DR Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”)</i><p>Three paragraphs later:<p>> <i>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.</i><p>Sharing our data with advertisers in return for money is exactly the way most people think about "selling data".
Are we able - with the version of FF currently out - to completely disable all transmission of data to Mozilla?<p>Of course this might change with these announced plans, but I want to know if the current baseline can be safe to use (without patching), or whether it's already rather far-gone.
I've said it countless times. Mozilla is the downfall of Firefox. Get Firefox out of Mozilla and the current administration, what Firefox getting better and better.
Time to move on. Mozilla lost latest pieces of relevancy.
Apparently, half a billion dollars per year can't get a modern browser nowadays.
At least in Mozilla case.
People love to pile on - it's a popular modern social game.<p>But in this case they are damaging something especially valuable, one of the leading privacy and freedom organizations in the world, during a very dangerous time. (And also one that doesn't buy or organize an army of 'grassroots' support.)<p><i>Cui bono?</i><p>I think Mozilla has made clear that they use the data for things the user requests. If someone thinks otherwise, please quote the current language (not the language from two days ago).<p>They also are innovators in privacy-preserving advertising. Almost anything else on the web is much worse: it has ads and collects personal data. Not only does Mozilla not collect personal data, if they can create effective privacy-preserving advertising, they could transform privacy (again) by not only sharing this technology but demonstrating to government that the privacy violations are unnecessary for business profitability.<p>Yet people are throwing all that out for the energy and excitement of piling on. That's a really bad choice, as far as I can see. If that's not what's happening, why are almost all posts expressed that way? How about some reasonable, calm discussion?
And the sad outcome is probably more people will go to Chrome, which 1. is already worse wrt privacy 2. if they get monopoly will absolutely destroy the open web (already busy doing what they can already get away with).
BS we're sorry you noticed announcement.<p>There's a few ff forks that may work for you. So far I'm quite happy with Librewolf since I migrated this morning, there's other forks that also cover Android, but there's more privacy-related research to do there as alternatives like Waterfox have past drama.<p>You can delete your Mozilla account here if you want to send a strong signal that privacy matters,<p>- <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-delete-my-firefox-account" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-delete-my-fire...</a><p>---<p>I'm quite concerned about the web becoming closed at this point. Bigger websites are mostly walled gardens, there's an increasingly big amount of generated crap (even before LLMs), and on top of that Chromium is the new IE, which on it's own a bit better than before since the core is open, but still a bad cherry on top, especially since the Ad push from Google. I don't want `chrome://settings/adPrivacy` on my browser as the optimal amount of ads and tracking is zero.
Their stance is: "The post office needs an unrestricted license to the content of your letters to transport them". This is beyond ridiculous.
I see a bunch of people saying that Firefox "needs to make money" or something to that effect, like they've never heard of free software.<p>When Flash was killed, enthusiasts re-implemented it entirely from scratch. I'm sure if Mozilla exploded today people would take the source code and continue maintaining Firefox. I'm aware maintaining a browser is complicated, but maintaining an operating system is even more-so, and that never stopped GNU.
"We were actually selling your data according to 'courts' so instead of making good on our promise to literally never do that we just memory-holed it. Not sure what the big deal is please continue to trust us."
> in the way that most people think about “selling data”<p>I quite frankly am opposed to any entity selling my data, in any way, for any reason, without my explicit consent because it implies you were taking my data in the first place, which is the core issue. It's my data. Not yours. Taking it (eg, telemetry) is what I object to. You selling it, I further object to. Stop. Without exception. To both. Period. The how and why of it does not matter. Worried about the breadth of the law opening you up to liability? Then stop chasing enshittification for your own gain. Don't collect the data in the first place. Its that easy.
I thought the initial wording/hype was around poorly phrased lawyer speak for "you give FF permission to interact (post/get requests) with a web page as a browser. Don't sue us".<p>The whole some may consider it "legally selling your data" proves this is not just a Terms of Use change in good faith.
"we never sell your data" but we actually do it...<p>For me, sharing my data even with "privacy preserving way" is not ok with the spirit I expected from something like Firefox.<p>Even just something like "someone open new tabs 50 times with your advertisement there" or "someone went to your website last Friday" is not ok to share about me and my activity!<p>So sad that corporate assholes took control of the project and try to confuse us with bullshit.
This pretty much confirms that this is what everyone thought the change was about. So we get clarity, but no actual change in course from Mozilla. Good. We now know very clearly where Mozilla and Firefox stand on privacy.
I'm sad and disappointed that simply charging a fair price in return for offering something of value - with no other strings attached - has become so out of fashion in tech world.<p>Almost everyone running tech businesses seems to assume that subscriptions or data capitalism are the only way to make any money these days. But I have paid for good software in the past and I know plenty of indie developers who still sell software like a product and do OK with that model. Copies of great software like Firefox could surely be sold - for actual money - to the kind of people who value its independence, privacy, and user focus. Offer free security updates for some reasonable period similar to an LTS release. The web moves fast enough that a lot of people will want to buy upgrades quite regularly anyway just for the new features.<p>Firefox appears to have close to 200M active users based on Mozilla's published data at <a href="https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity" rel="nofollow">https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity</a>. If they could get 1/20 of those users to pay them an average of $10 per year - that's less than one <i>month</i> of a standard subscription to a major streaming service in most Western countries - then that's $100M/year in revenues. Based on the public financial statements that's on the same scale as their subscription and advertising revenue and their annual spend on development activities.<p>Another possibility might be to hide some of the developer resources behind some token paywall. Almost everyone I know who works in web dev uses MDN regularly. Firefox dev tools have a lot of useful things about them. Then maybe you can even keep the main browser free and get some revenue from devs - who are mostly going to file it as a business expense anyway and whose employers benefit greatly from the continued existence and maintenance of these resources.<p>Sure everyone would complain - just as everyone complains about paying a few bucks for a good text or graphics editor they use for hundreds or thousands of hours per year to make 1000x the asking price. But the value is obviously there to many people. I think a lot of Firefox users in particular would probably respect the transparent attempt to keep the lights on without compromising on the USPs that make Firefox attractive to those users in the first place.
I’ve used Netscape, the Mozilla browser, and then Firefox, so I guess I’m a long-time user. But as of today, I’m no longer using Firefox because of this.
TLDR Firefox has been selling your data all along in exchange for ad money, but now state laws with more teeth forced them to come clean about this behavior.