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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

@ded@lemy.lol
link
fedilink
English
56h

Librewolf is mostly a autoconfig file for Firefox (which is a Firefox feature). https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/raw/branch/master/librewolf.cfg I doubt implementation of terms will be optional.

Chris Remington
mod
link
fedilink
26h

Thanks!

@isosphere@beehaw.org
link
fedilink
English
13
edit-2
10h

Librewolf has some trouble with some websites. For example, it won’t load one of my own that makes a GRPC request over TLS, stating that the certificate issuer is unknown despite it being the same certificate used on the accepted-as-secure page the request is made from.

Chris Remington
mod
link
fedilink
910h

Hey! Thanks for the heads up. This looks good and I’m going to try it out.

NaibofTabr
link
fedilink
English
810h

…which is Gecko, which is Mozilla.

Create a post

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 1 user online
  • 79 users / day
  • 251 users / week
  • 735 users / month
  • 2.12K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.75K Posts
  • 72.7K Comments
  • Modlog