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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 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 An archived version from January 30 says: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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

So what license does librewolf have?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Ok, so I did some checking and Firefox uses a custom license from Mozilla, which says the open source code can be freely mixed with proprietary code, as long as you disclose and also distribute the open source files you’ re using.

This is much more permissive than some other open source licenses. LGPG, for example, only allows this mixing if you use the open source code as a library that needs to be separate from the main proprietary binary.

That said, Librewolf apparently licenses all its source code in the same Mozilla license, which means no issues here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Librewolf has no code. 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.