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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • RejZoR@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    Firefox Reddit sub is pretty full of outrage posts. Rightfully so.

    I’ve been a long time supporter of Firefox because fuck Google and their Chromium spawns feeding their dominance, but what Mozilla is doing now, I’m planning on moving to Waterfox from the looks of it. Present on all platforms, Android, Windows and Linux, supports sync and has all the tracking and telemetry bullshit stripped out. I just wish they’d get versions up to date a bit faster, but oh well, it’s probably a small team of people doing it in their free time so I can’t complain too much.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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      16 hours ago

      I like Waterfox. I started using it for the JXL support. But it’s significantly more memory-leaky than the current version of Firefox, and small FOSS teams seem to think the standard amount of RAM sold in laptops today is comically low and believe we’re all hauling 64+ GB or something.