An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

They also said "Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”)", and I'm struggling to fathom what they could possibly think that "most people" think selling data could mean other than "giving your data to someone else for compensation", which seems pretty much exactly what the California law says. Yes, it's embedded in some legalese, but surely Mozilla has lawyers?

This is a funny case where Mozilla thought they are clarifying their position by pointing out how ridiculously CA defines "sales" only for it to blow up in their face. This is not the first time it happens to companies where in an act of desperation they issue some "apology" or explanation only to make the whole thing worse.

Now people will read even more carefully their privacy policy https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice and may find things like:

> Firefox also shows its own search suggestions based on information stored on your local device (including recent search terms, open tabs, and previously visited URLs). These suggestions may include sponsored suggestions from Mozilla’s partners [...] or relevant URLs that are popular in your country.

> Mozilla processes [...] how many searches you perform, how many sponsored suggestions you see and whether you interact with them.

> Mozilla collects technical and interaction data, such as the position, size, views and clicks on New Tab content or ads, to understand how people are interacting with our content [...] This data may be shared with our advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.

> we share data across Mozilla-controlled affiliates and subsidiaries. We [...] disclose personal data as part of a corporate transaction, such as a merger, acquisition, sale of assets or similar transaction

> [...] retain personal data for more than 25 months, but actual retention periods may vary depending on the type of data and the purpose(s) for which it was collected

[Definitions]

> Technical data : Device type, operating system, IP address, ISP

> Settings: Enhanced Tracking Protection settings, cookie settings, permissions (location, camera, microphone), toolbar customization.

> Location : Country code, city.

> Precise Location: Your precise location (within a few feet or meters).

> Interaction data : How many tabs you have open or what you’ve clicked on. Click counts, impression data, attribution data, how many searches performed, time on page, ad and sponsored tile clicks.

> Browsing data: [...] websites and URLs you’ve visited. [...] (travel, shopping, social media), top level domains (example.com) or specific web pages visited.

I feel like there _is_ some daylight between what people hear when someone says "Firefox is selling your data" and, for example, Firefox using your IP address to put you in a rough country-level geoblock to determine whether to show you an ad that was sold to all users in a country.

Yet the second one, which I think would be very much considered close to harmless from my perspective (compared to an alternative of "an ad is shown to everyone across the world"), would, I think, still fit into this metric of your data being sold.

Though maybe I'm misinterpreting what the CCPA's breadth would be.

I have been a bit disillusioned by FF for some time, and would like for them to figure out some version of a business model in order to survive, and so we can know the contours of that business model. Trying to play "we do not do business things at all" with them constantly shipping weird ad-ful features and stuff like Pocket... let's see if we can make this honest!

Mozilla, then Phoenix, then Firefox user for over 27y or so.

If they can't stop abusing their users, I will look for another browser, goddamnit.

Mozilla is continuing to dig its own grave

If they would simply tell us what part of Firefox is affected by the CCPA's definition of "selling user data", there would be no room for misinterpretation and this would be over.

If it's as innocent as "Firefox has to send HTTP packets to arbitrary web servers to achieve the fundamental function of loading a page" and that web server is considered 3rd party by CCPA, then everyone would understand... this is either poor communication or they are hiding something else (which everyone should rightly assume in this day and age).

Just tell us already Mozilla!

Would it have been better if Firefox/Mozilla went under as a result of never compromising on their principles for income 5 years ago, as opposed to continuing to exist in this less than optimal form today? If the business incompetence of where to put all the existing money were resolved.

I feel like the people who understand Mozilla's true principles have long since moved on by this point, and the crowd of those unaware still use Firefox as a daily driver, for better or worse. That crowd might have just moved to Chrome without Firefox as an option anymore.

Although, as I understand it Firefox and Chrome will be closer to each other in terms of 3rd-party data selling from now on with this ToS change.

Hasn't Mozilla gotten enough money that if they hadn't wasted it they could've been living solely off interest by now?

Mozilla mentioned their viability in this statement, but one has to wonder how much more viable they’d be had they not wasted tens of millions of dollars on acquisitions such as this, Pocket, and of course their former CEO’s salary. I would happily donate to a company that focussed on just making Firefox and Thunderbird, but the reason why I don’t and probably will not donate to Mozilla ever again is that I have no idea what hare-brained acquisition they’ll do next.

Their mission and plan for the future is so incomprehensible that it’s probably just easier to assume actual malice.

> "private" ad tracking

My guess is that they're aiming to pivot to become a Brave competitor, and either find a new (profitable) niche in the market, or just ride the business down to collapse.

Don't forget that private, hard-to-access data is now doubly valuable as AI training data.

Facebook is sort of tech’s Enron / McDonnell Douglas.

> It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0]

That greatly misrepresents what the article says; really Mozilla acquired a company with a mission to get user data out of the advertising industry, which happened to be founded by former Meta employees:

Two years after leaving Meta to launch their own privacy-focused ad measurement startup in 2022, Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood have sold their company to Mozilla. ...

Mozilla had initially been talking to Anonym, which uses privacy-enhancing technologies to build measurement and targeting solutions, about a potential partnership.

“But that quickly turned into, ‘Wow, our missions are basically the same,’” Chambers said. “We realized that together we could move a lot faster.”

That shared mission is predicated on the notion that advertising and privacy are not – or at least don’t have to be – mutually exclusive.

“We both believe that privacy-preserving technologies are a critical part of the solution to the privacy problem in digital advertising,” Chambers said. ...

Anonym also has technology that allows ad platforms and advertisers to securely share encrypted impression and conversion data within a trusted execution environment for attribution, causal lift measurement and lookalike modeling. (A trusted execution environment is the secure area of a main processor where code can be run safely and in isolation.)

To be fair, the major ad platforms have long offered attribution and measurement solutions, Mudd said. “But they required the data to come into their system,” he added. “In this world, that doesn’t have to happen.”

Ahh, the Unity game engine special.

How about don't send ANYONE's personal information, anonymized or not, to anyone including themselves? I think that's what people want. But that will never happen because you can't make money from it.

I dunno, if legal recommends wording for your TOS you should probably listen to them.

Right. Some people want Sync, Pocket, oneline translation, etc. Others like me just want a browser. There should be a simple option to choose between a browser and some multifunction beast that some people and even more managers at Mozilla are dreaming of.

Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on.

The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla Suite, and they had focused on how to sustainably do that, they never would've needed to diversify income sources.

Their weird org structure is their own fault. Millions of dollars squandered on things most people simply do not care about, while neglecting Firefox for a decade.

When Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix first came out, the org structure wasn't that weird yet. The hybrid structure came a few years later, and even then it was fine for a while, but somehow mission creep set in and they became this ginormous org that did nothing useful, but padded exec salaries at the expense of their only service that people actually cared about, the Firefox browser. They kept adding more and more ads and intrusive partnership and lost marketshare year after year until it became completely irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the Mozilla org tried to become some sort of EFF-wannabe, but heavy on the virtue signaling and low on producing anything of actual value.

At this point, I think Firefox would be better off spun off and managed by another FOSS entity altogether, not whatever the husk of Mozilla is today.

"donations amount to so little" is very misleading stated like that because Mozilla just doesn't give us any way to donate to Firefox development or even just their FOSS efforts in general. Mozilla is one of the very few companies I've donated to even when I had little in the way of discretionary income, and is one of the first options people think of when they think of FOSS software they want to donate to. But then I learnt that any donations like this are highly unlikely to be spent on the software we're donating it for, and at that point I might as well donate to a random local charity instead.

I'm not gonna claim that donations would have rivaled the Google revenue otherwise, but they will certainly be many many times higher than what they are. Lots of people are willing to and even want to set up a regular donation to Firefox as the lone non-Chrome bulwark in the FOSS space. There would have been grassroots efforts to get more people to donate on the regular, hell I would have put in serious work on such efforts if we actually had a way to donate to keep Firefox alive and healthy.

It doesn’t help that they make it hard to donate to a specific product’s development. I’d donate to Firefox. I wouldn’t give a penny to anything of their other distractions.

(And others would support exactly the opposite, I’m sure. But no one gets to sponsor what they personally care about.)

Reasonable people want people running the product they love to succeed, too. But when the equation involves obscene executive salaries, back tracking on _promises_, terrible decision that lost money, and overall just too much money to justify what's being done. The end result is what you see now: a lot of upset people and there is nothing _unfortunate_ for Mozilla.

I have a lot of trouble seeing what you are trying to defend here -- I really tried but couldn't. I find it pretty hypocritical to say that you disabled data collection while you trust them over your competitors to protect your data -- so you are saying that you trust them but you won't adjust your bottom line to help them succeed anyway?

I really mean well: sometimes you just shouldn't try to appear to be reasonable to a situation that isn't, it actually makes things worse for everyone. I used to do that and have learned some hard lessons.

> The browser market is highly competitive

And that's exactly the problem: treating it like a market. I don't want browsers to be a competitive market, in the same way that I don't want libraries, primary schools, firefighters or healthcare to be a competitive market.

In modern society, they're essential needs, which need to stop catering to the capitalist overlords and need to focus on the needs of the many.

> donations amount to so little compared to its Google revenue

“Interesting to note that the Mozilla CEO earned nearly as much ($5.6 M) as Mozilla received in donations ($7 M)” [1].

[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

> The browser market is highly competitive

I disagree. There's one dominant player with ~66% of the market, a distant secont place at ~18%, an embarrassing third place at 5%, and then a bunch of also-rans making up the rest [0]. This doesn't look like a particularly healthy, nor competitive, market.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

> I really struggle to understand what legal team believes this language is necessary in downloaded software.

Exactly. Even if nothing is changing at Mozilla, their legal team has invented a new interpretation of copyright law. That’s a huge deal from a legal perspective—Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc need to be rushing to add corresponding terms to their applications.

Mozilla PR is dropping the ball completely by trying to sweep this under the rug as ‘standard legal boilerplate’ because it’s not a clause in any other application I’ve ever seen.

Since I use FireFox at work, I don’t even have permission to give Mozilla a license to the content I create on the clock, so I will be switching browsers.

They have for example recently added AI chat sidebar via Firefox Labs. So in effect, the browser itself is collecting and sending information to third parties. And I imagine Mozilla is or will get some money for these integrations. I would guess this is how they will try to diversify their income away from Google Search integration.

Of course the question then shifts to, do we need AI in the browser sidebar?

> This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

I actually disagree, fundamentally.

This is digital content, so "ownership" isn't the same as for physical stuff.

Lets look at analogies: "piracy isn't theft" (because the original owner still keeps their copy!). Also, surely if Mozilla can sell your data, they must have owned it first! But you also keep your data!

So clearly, to "own" digital stuff is different from "owning" physical stuff.

Then, how do we define "own" for digital stuff? I'd say a sufficient definition would be, "possess and can do whatever".

So when Mozilla says "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license [...] necessary to operate Firefox", and then in subsequent paragraphs argue that selling ads is necessary to operate Firefox... Yes, we can add two and two together.

Now, apologists will claim that the literal statement in new terms is "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox", but obviously, the DO NOT NEED A LICENSE for doing as you request in Firefox (i.e. sending POST requests directly to third parties), so clearly there's some shady business involved.

> not downloaded software

Tbf, any softwares that send your input to an external (like browsers...) should disclose like this too. The thing that sends those data is your software, not you. Otherwise, after you click on the button "Purchase" with your credit card information, the only way to not grant your software the rights to send that information is you driving to the stores and give them your credit card by yourself.

> "send unsolicited communications" so no filing a bug report

why you think that filing bug reports in place inviting bug reports is "unsolicited communication"?

They just lost a monopoly case because they paid Mozilla all that money, this theory has always made little sense and sticking to it now makes even less.

they also couldn't have timed this better with the manifestv3 thing

Yes, of course. If Mozilla decided to do what other user here suggested (`spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development`) I doubt that the 500M/year would continue flowing.