Not a good look for Firefox. Third partners and device fingerprinting clearly mentioned in the documents.
The move is the latest development in a series of shifts Mozilla has undergone over the past year.
The gecko engine and Firefox forks, such as Tor, Mullvad, Librewolf, and Arkenfox, are stables of private, open source web browsing.
In fact, Mozilla’s is one of the few browser engines out there, in a protocol-heavy industry that many say only corporate or well-funded non-profits can reliably develop.
What is more, daily driving the more hardened-for-privacy Firefox derivatives can be frowned upon by many sites, including your bank and workplace.
Mozilla’s enshittification leaves the open source community without a good alternative to Firefox, after years of promoting it as a privacy-friendly alternative to spyware-cum-browser Chrome.
THIS COMMENT IS NOT MINE - SOURCE: https://lemm.ee/comment/18521903
Before everyone freaks out over “terms of use = Firefox bad now” (I’m citing the actual Terms of Use and Privacy Notice)
I’ll add emphasis as needed.
This doesn’t mean you’re giving them a license to do whatever they want with your data, it means you’re giving them the ability to use that data explicitly as you choose to navigate the web. (e.g. you use Firefox to make a post, they have to process those keystrokes through Firefox to send it to the server, and thus could require permission to do that in the form of having a license)
They explicitly have the license only to use the information in line “with your use of Firefox,” and to “navigate, experience, and interact with online content.” not to do whatever they want. They should have worded this better, but this isn’t one of those “we own everything you ever put in your browser” kind of clauses.
This is standard on basically every site, and kind of obvious. You shouldn’t be able to say “you should do this thing,” have them do it, and then say “actually I own the license to this and you have to pay me”
Nothing requires you to stay in this contract after you stop using the services, and this is just reaffirming the fact that, yes, they can stop offering Firefox in the future if they simply can’t sustain it, without somehow breaking contract. More legalese just to protect them from frivolous lawsuits.
This basically just means “don’t do crimes using our browser.” Again, standard clause that basically everything has to make sure that nobody can claim in court that Firefox/Mozilla is liable for something a user did with their software.
Standard liability clause, basically everything also has this.
And that’s it. That’s the terms of use. Nothing here is out of the ordinary, uncalled for, or unreasonable for them to have.
Now let’s move on to the new Privacy Notice.
This just states that if you use the chatbots, you’re subject to their policies, and also Mozilla will collect very light amounts of data to understand how often and to what degree the feature is used. The first part is functionally no different from saying “If you go to OpenAI’s website and use ChatGPT, you’ll be bound by their ToS.” Yeah, of course you will, that’s obvious.
Another optional feature that, if you choose to turn on and use yourself, will obviously have to collect data that is required for such a thing to work. It can’t check reviews if it can’t see the reviews on the website. As for the product recommendations and sponsored content, that’s not desirable, but they do very clearly mention that you can just turn it off in settings.
If you search on their site for extensions, they have to process your search, and if you need to install addons, they’ll have to connect to Mozilla’s servers and collect the relevant data to make sure the extensions are available where you are. Shocking. /s
This has been around for a while already. If you choose to use beta features, then yeah, they’ll collect some diagnostics. That’s why it’s in beta: to get data on if it’s working properly.
Checking for updates and providing malicious site blocking requires connecting to servers to download the updates and having a list to block bad sites. Again, very shocking. /s
And that’s basically it for that.
I seriously don’t understand the reactionary attitude so many people have towards things like this. Read the policies yourself, and you’ll see that their explicit purpose is either:
None of this is abnormal.
It is abnormal for a free software project to have an EULA (i.e. a contract that one must agree to in order to install and use the software). This particular EULA does not seem to be as onerous as most but it may still place substantial restrictions on use.
The acceptable use policy, for example, covers much more than just crime (including a prohibition on “graphic depictions of sexuality or violence”). However, it also specifically refers to “Mozilla services” so one could argue that it doesn’t apply to normal usage of Firefox; however, the Firefox EULA also specifically claims it does. Is Firefox itself a Mozilla service? I would assume not under the usually understood definition of such, but it’s not really clarified.
It’s far easier to use something unburdened by an EULA, so I’m typing this from Librewolf.
I refuted most of these points on this user’s post.
This is absolutely abnormal. No browser should require a license to my own data unless they plan on doing something with it.
No other FOSS includes this language and I would argue that Firefox executable is no longer FOSS. It’s now source available.
Yeah I am unconvinced of this line of thought. If I use (say) Kate Editor to edit a document, do the developers of Kate need a license to the content of that document in order to save it to my desktop? Since the text content is stored in a Qt widget does Qt also need such a license? Linux itself carries the data from the application to the disk, do the Linux developers (all of them?) also need a license?
A better example would be stored credentials, credit card information, and other PII type data.
Personal emails, messaging, anything
“Mozilla can’t do anything wrong”. And people keep swallowing.