Mozilla owns "information you input through Firefox"

"Actions speak louder than words. "

Indeed. Talking about privacy and having spyware and ads activated by default and now this probably to legally safeguard this and more speak a very clear language.

The only reason to still use FF is indeed, that the competition is worse in this regard.

But that will change, once Ladybird becomes mature enough.

The same effect applies to political parties. The people that care about X focus their complaints to the party that is trying to address issues with X.

Mozilla's goals are still much more aligned with my own than any other browser vendor. Not even close. It's not a betrayal, it's a difference of opinion between friends.

Edit: If that. I personally think this Terms of Use thing is a storm in a teacup.

So only bookmarks of porn sites if you have Sync active, sending porn tabs to a Firefox instance on another device, browsing porn while on the Mozilla VPN, or using Firefox Relay to sign up to a porn website with an anonymous email address

Fine by me since I don't use a Mozilla account, but sounds to me like I shouldn't get a Mozilla account either

I think Mozilla VPN is a Mozilla service?

It's pretty odd if you aren't allowed to use their VPN to watch or share porn

- send unsolicited communications (for example cold emailing an employer about a job) - Deceive or mislead (for example inviting your brother over for a surprise party under false pretenses) - Purchase legal controlled products (for example sending the pharmacy a refill for your Xanax) - Collect email addresses without permission (for example putting together a list of emails to contact public officials)

> Firefox isn't a Mozilla service.

They might clarify that in the agreement. I doubt many people are intimately familiar with Mozilla, Firefox, 'services', etc. to distinguish. I am and I didn't think of it in a brief reading (which is all I have time for).

It's against ToS to watch R rated movies.

Mozilla VPN is a service Mozilla provides though. White-labelled Mullvad or not, it a contract between Mozilla and the user and therefore presumably covered by this terms of use.

I would say porn is probably in the top 3 if not number 1 use for VPNs

And yet these terms of service—for Firefox—specifically apply the AUP to “your use of Firefox,” no?

The entire AUP is prefixed “You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:”. There’s nothing in the AUP that doesn’t refer to “Mozilla’s services.” When the Firefox TOS explicitly includes this AUP, how could it make sense unless they think of Firefox as one of their services?

At the risk of restating the gp’s quote:

> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.

So what about synced bookmarks?

The squeeze on any content that religious people find 'yucky' is double-pronged in the US - encouraged both by governments and businesses. Paypal, Visa, Mastercard et al are given complete discretion over what transactions they can block, and they have already extensively used this to deprive legal NSFW platforms and creators of their income.

So, on one end, state governments are trying to strongarm NSFW services by imposing draconian requirements that ask users to submit their private data to some random opaque 'benevolent' third party business - and on the other, payment processors are using their legal right to refuse whatever transaction for any reason so they can starve them of income.

Confused. What do Firefox's terms of service have to do with puritanism ? Have Firefox developers become puritanist or something ? That would be extremely surprising if true. Any evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) to this ?

The Puritans have been trying to ban porn here since the concept has existed, it's never stopped, and it's never going to stop. They're miserable and they want everyone else to be too. That's like most of their religion. Going to church, being ashamed of bodies, and judging people.

I'm all down to write off contract law as "puritanism" but the rot is far deeper than an aesthetic (and frankly I'm unclear how puritanism applies to this situation at all).

EDIT: I'm not sure why porn is particularly interesting here when most internet activity seems to be potentially against terms of service.

IIRC, terms like that have been in agreements for many years. It's boilerplate, almost.

It's gonna be a weird few years that's for sure. I'll leave it to the historians to decide when the actual tipping point was but the shift in the GOP from being run by Republicans with a few bones thrown to Conservatives every now and again when it's time to drum up votes to the show now being run by Conservatives is going to be the point between two political eras.

It's by far not the first time this has happened but it's kinda surreal to be alive for one.

My conspiracy theory is that gears are slowly turning to revamp the culture, redefine what’s acceptable/not acceptable and eventually suggest that if you won’t have kids you’re not accepted in the society. Basically a funky way to reverse the population decline, as the governments are realizing this problem won’t be fixed by free markets and etc.

I don't think that's the problem here, as I don't want to see porn on e.g. Mozilla's forums either. There's a place and time for that content and Mozilla shouldn't be the one to decide for others. The problem is whether Firefox is a Mozilla "service" or not, and the way the terms is linked implies that it is.

Comments such as yours are missing the point.

Mozilla's ToS applies for Firefox's use, and this is literally written by Mozilla themselves:

“Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy”

There's no distinction between the browser and Mozilla's online services here.

---

And even if it were referring only to features such as “profile syncing” (and it doesn't refer only to that), does this mean that people can't have bookmarks to porn? And why would Mozilla care about how people use profile syncing at all? I thought it was e2e encrypted.

Legal trouble for sexuality and violence? I am sorry, in what jurisdiction are their servers? Iran or North Korea?

So, as someone else pointed out, saving bookmarks of porn and using their bookmarks sync service would be a problem.

It's easy to laugh and dismiss that. But what if you're a journalist covering war? You're going to have plenty of bookmarks of graphic violence, and therefore run afoul of this license.

> I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it.

Yes you do.

From Microsoft's Services Agreement [1]:

> To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services.

That's broader than what Mozilla is asking for.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en/servicesagreement

A license grant like this is common in the context of review systems or forums or the like. For example if I go to addons.mozilla.org and post a review for an addon, Mozilla arguably needs a license grant like this to allow them to publish the review. And preferably they would want to word it in a way that then allows them to use the same review in print or a super bowl spot.

The weird thing is that a) I don't think this license grant covers any of that, since publishing a review doesn't improve my experience, it improves other's experiences, and b) Mozilla Websites like addons.mozilla.org have a completely different TOS [1], with a completely different license grant.

I have no idea what this license grant is supposed to accomplish, or what it would even allow that requires a license grant in the first place

1: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/mozilla/

> what limits exactly does this place on Mozilla?

Mozilla is bound to only use the content to help the use navigate, experience and interact with online content as the user has indicated.

> One thing they could do with your financial data is show it to you (least harm).

Yes - this is what the user indicated.

> Another thing is to aggregate it with other's data (medium harm).

And the user has not indicated that this would be a permitted use of the data - thereby revoking the license of the first clause. If the data is used outside of the final clause of the license, that is unlicensed use of data. This would be a material breach of the contract by the corporation. This could open them up to massive legal penalties.

I think that's just a cover-all and they also have a privacy policy [1] which is explicit about how they use it and how they don't, for example:

"the data stays on your device and is not sent to Mozilla’s servers unless it says otherwise in this Notice."

... "When you perform a search in Firefox, your search query, device data and location data will be processed by your default search engine"

... "Mozilla derives the high level category [...] from keywords in that query [...] privacy preserving technologies such that Mozilla only learns that someone, somewhere, performed a search relating to a particular category, without knowing who."

... Review Checked, AI Chatbots, advertising on new tab page, etc.

So yea Firefox does so much they pretty much have to use your data, but it's not a blank cheque to do what they want.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

Not so say I like some of those things - advertising and categorizing searches. But still, it's finite and explicit.

> First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause.

I believe your confusion stems from a misreading of "as you indicate with your use of Firefox". You're reading it like "by using Firefox, you indicate".

Contemplate the difference between

"The car is allowed to move as you indicate with the controls."

versus

"By using the controls, you indicate the car is allowed to move."

The former explicitly only allows the car to realize your intent, whereas the latter gives the car license to do whatever it pleases.

> remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers"

You mean wording like this?

""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."

Which is contained in both the link you provided, and on their official Privacy FAQ: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/

I'm really confused how you can possibly claim that they removed the wording when it's right there for you.

> {% if switch('firefox-tou') %}

      <p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>

    {% else %}

      <p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>

    {% endif %}

Are lawyers OK with a client doing things like this? Or is this a client you fire?

I've been using LibreWolf as my daily driver for a couple of years. Highly recommended! Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Ranked as the highest for privacy protection in a 2022 study: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/06/15/privacytests-reveals-how-y...

Occasionally, you might get a broken website but to fix it you just click on the shield icon and lower the privacy settings.

Any recommendations for an Android Firefox replacement?

If that was the intention, the correct term would have been "Mozilla's services". The very first sentence of that document defines Firefox: "Firefox is free and open source web browser software".

As a non-legal word of advice: when reading legal text, always read defensively. Never assume good will when legal matters are concerned.

Yes, it seems like Mozilla has long had a problem of marketing getting in the way of communication. This keeps happening over and over gain. They make changes for marketing reasons, and then people are confused when they make policy changes because they've solidified their naming so much in the pursuit of brand recognition that their audience (rightly) is confused about what they're actually saying when they use that brand name to refer to a singular component of their offerings.

What’s wrong with transparency for advertisements? If you take offense to the “boosting” of news sites, I see the point but now we have Elon arbitrarily boosting his own content on X.

Not sure how you end up solving that issue other than perhaps a more transparent system like the original Birdwatch.

- "It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses,"

Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSLint#License

- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."

> It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".

Trying to take back the license based on use of the software, however, would make it not "open source", since that would be use restriction.

> Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content.

> If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this

> [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

I just opened that page on LibreWolf without any problems.

> gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content

It works fine, even with JS disabled.

This is purely FUD per my experience. I use librewolf on websites behind cloudflare and with plenty of js. They all work just as well as they did in Firefox.

Librewolf sends Firefox in the user agent, and you can toggle Firefox "features" on if a website you use requires them.

Not trying to convince you to switch to it--you do you. Just sharing with someone who might be reading this thread and that hasn't tried librewolf.

Oh, I thought IceWeasel had been renamed to IceCat, but the repo you linked to has recent activity and calls it IceWeasel, now I'm a bit confused. Glad to see it's active though.

Speculatively:

- nonexclusive, because they're not demanding exclusive rights to your content. If they did, there's no way this would fly.

- royalty free, because otherwise you could charge them money for doing anything with your data, even things you've asked them to do.

- worldwide, because you may ask them to communicate with servers in other countries. i.e. you are using Firefox Sync to sync your bookmarks and you travel overseas, your bookmarks are now traveling between two countries.

The question is "why do they need a license at all", IMO. The qualifiers on the license all make sense to me. It's possible additional qualifiers like 'short-term' could make it less scary.

Not true. I was under the impression that Firefox was a privacy-oriented browser until these Terms were published today. I'm now posting this from LibreWolf, which I have just now installed for the first time.