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Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic (arstechnica.com)

submitted 10 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 An archived version from January 30 says: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] 12 points 6 hours ago

This is completely accurate, and people don't know how non anonymous it is.

Your hair one for example. Who cares, say you even have brunette hair, something generic. Okay, then let's add on that you're using an iPhone. How narrow is the search now? What state you're in? Who owns a specific model of TV?

I would argue that with only just a few data points you could be identified.

And now they are taking everything you put into your browser and everything you take out. Add some AI pizazz and they'll be able to build a pretty accurate profile about you.