this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic | Mozilla says it deleted promise because "sale of data" is defined broadly (arstechnica.com)
submitted 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

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[–] zecg@lemmy.world 29 points 3 hours ago

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,

Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don't pay CEOs millions and don't force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I'd gladly pay for Firefox that doesn't make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL'd code that's mine as much as yours.

You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there's projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you're brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.

It's kind of sad I don't use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.