I don't think that's the case. This article says that an overly generalised definition of "sale" was proposed in California law, but that language was removed before the law came into effect.
Mozilla is not selling your data, yet, but they have removed their pledge to never sell data.
It's an intentional gradual change, and they're playing a sleight of hand trick getting you to talk about whether they actually are selling data right now rather than the canary dying.
It could be a classic case of intentional overreach and then backpedalling to where they wanted to be. They didn't just remove the canary statements where they plegded not to sell data, they literally gave themselves the right to sell data and then put it back on the shelf - that way you're talking about the rights being back where they belong but not noticing the dead canary.
The boilerplate is just that, and they fixed that in the rewrite. However the real issue comes next in the article.
The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
This is a canary statement. The removal of those statements are an indication that the ethos of the organisation has changed.
This article wasn't really clickbait, although it was a little sensationalist and hasn't demonstrated actual selling of data. However Mozilla is rightfully being grilled over this.
I'd be interested to see some sources about the sale of data being any transfer of data. That's a new one to me. A quick search yielded this article, which seems to suggest that the language was proposed in California law but then scrapped before the law came into effect.
FYI, Lemmy uses pure markdown, where you have to put > on every line to make a continuous quote.
Like
this.
The first part is forgiveable, accidentally including a standard phrasing.
Removing the pledge not to sell data is the canary in the coalmine dying. Time to get out.
Unfortunately there isn't a real alternative to Firefox, there are only hardened forks, but that's still not as bad as using a Chromium browser over official Chrome.
Yes, these days you might have like 20 devices plugged in, but they're all DC and most only draw about 10W each. Also, they're not all drawing power at the same time.
Back in the day your monitor(s) would have been drawing a lot more power (I'm talking way back with CRT monitors). Also, your PC doesn't draw 750 watts all the time if at all - 750W is the max rating for the power supply. Even if you did have a very power hungry system (read: GPU) it would only draw that while running full whack, most of the time the PC will idle at lower clock speeds and lower power.
Your soldering irons are probably only 25W, certainly less than 100W (unless you're showing off). The big things are generally anything involving heating, but many of the things at your desk probably don't use that much. After heating it's motors. And, again, these things are generally not all on at the same time.
Suffice it to say, there isn't really any higher risk to the volume and type of load we have today than back when electricity was first installed in houses. It certainly should be said that the installations are much safer now than they used to be, where even a faulty install like this shouldn't lead to a fire - if your cable is installed in ducting or kopex then even if a faulty termination heats the cable up there won't be anything in contact with it to start a fire.
But you should still get check these things checked out. The layers of redundancy by design are great, but you don't want holes in the Swiss cheese to line up - that's when bad things happen.
We have a lot more stuff plugged in than the era when most houses were built.
While this is true, most of the devices we use today are DC devices and much lower power. Your standard USB device is maybe 5V and 2A, so only 10W.
Yes I'd just found that! That's insane.
At the end though the Controversy section implies it was probably exaggerated. Even as a show vessel it would have been grossly impractical with the technology at the time. Still, it's so fantastical, I love it!
The name “forty” refers not to the number of oars, but to the number of rowers on each vertical “column” of oars that propelled it
What the hell, 40 per column, just how many rowers did it have all together?!
Edit: Wow, 4000! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessarakonteres However the controversy section is well worth a read hah.
I've only just started looking into this, but I think it's all fluff. The claim is that any sharing of data could be considered a sale.
This article says that an overly generalised definition of "sale" was proposed in California law, but that language was removed before the law came into effect. The CCPA webpage also frequently talks about opting out of "sale or sharing", implying those two are different concepts. Thus Mozilla should be able to share data as needed to perform user-driven functions, while still retaining the pledge not to sell user data.
There could also be more nuance in this. Perhaps Mozilla is concerned about liability based on third party actions - if they share with a 3rd party to perform a service, but that 3rd party doesn't follow the privacy terms, then Mozilla has an increased risk of litigation.
I haven't started digging into the actual law itself yet, but the cynic in me wonders if organisations and their lawyers are looking to use this misunderstood news story as an excuse to weaken the privacy rights language. And the effect here is more significant to the user than the mild reduction in risk for Mozilla.