This isn’t a one-off thing, it’s part of a trend, and that’s the part that I’m worried about. If everything was peachy except for one small TOS change I’d shrug and say it was an oversight. Mozilla is dipping their toes into advertising though, which IMO has a corrosive effect that will keep nudging them towards privacy invasion. Here’s a few examples:
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.
Why would they go out of their way to remove that unless they’re selling it or are planning to? (before and after)
Mozilla collects technical and interaction data, such as the position, size, views and clicks on New Tab content or ads, to understand how people are interacting with our content and to personalize future content, including sponsored content. This data may be shared with our advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
They’re selling your data and it’s opt-out, not opt-in. That’s not cool IMO. They also bought an advertising company, and they’re not doing that because they’re moving away from advertising as a business model.
Yes, they’re saying a few nice things about “privacy-preserving”, but good anonymization is hard, they’ve got a clear trend towards advertising and making money off of selling your data, and there’s no good reason for the trend to stop at “just the tip”. So to wrap that all back around to the submitted article, here’s what they changed to it first:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
That’s super vague, does “selling my data to advertisers” count as “helping me experience online content”? I obviously don’t think so, but does Mozilla agree? Here’s the updated one after the backlash:
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. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
“Purpose of doing as you request with the content you input” is a lot better language that is less vague. It’s not perfect (silently adding in opt-out features probably counts as “doing what I request”), but is still way better.
Which is all to say that I think this change was indeed cause for concern, the backlash helped improve the language, and that Mozilla no longer sparks joy.
This isn’t a one-off thing, it’s part of a trend, and that’s the part that I’m worried about. If everything was peachy except for one small TOS change I’d shrug and say it was an oversight. Mozilla is dipping their toes into advertising though, which IMO has a corrosive effect that will keep nudging them towards privacy invasion. Here’s a few examples:
They removed this section from the FAQ:
Why would they go out of their way to remove that unless they’re selling it or are planning to? (before and after)
And then the Firefox Privacy Notice states:
They’re selling your data and it’s opt-out, not opt-in. That’s not cool IMO. They also bought an advertising company, and they’re not doing that because they’re moving away from advertising as a business model.
Yes, they’re saying a few nice things about “privacy-preserving”, but good anonymization is hard, they’ve got a clear trend towards advertising and making money off of selling your data, and there’s no good reason for the trend to stop at “just the tip”. So to wrap that all back around to the submitted article, here’s what they changed to it first:
That’s super vague, does “selling my data to advertisers” count as “helping me experience online content”? I obviously don’t think so, but does Mozilla agree? Here’s the updated one after the backlash:
“Purpose of doing as you request with the content you input” is a lot better language that is less vague. It’s not perfect (silently adding in opt-out features probably counts as “doing what I request”), but is still way better.
Which is all to say that I think this change was indeed cause for concern, the backlash helped improve the language, and that Mozilla no longer sparks joy.