this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
658 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

63375 readers
4751 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
658
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]
150 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I told ya so? I was smarter than everyone else and figured it out first?

FF has been one of the better full-featured browsers with generous amount of add-ons/plugins. There was no reason not to use it vs some less functional browser or some corporate data miner like Chrome. It still is, however some alternatives are catching up. Time will tell how it all shakes out as far as the battle between functionality, privacy, ad- and tracking-blockers, and people willing to build and maintain free browsers and plugins.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

The first thing I said;

I feel a little vindicated.

I apologize. I literally don't know how to make it any more clear than that.