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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
I have been advised it’s not a fork but a reconfig of default firefox, therefore it would technically be subject to the same ToS.
Edit: here’s where I got that (with a link to the cfg) https://lemmy.world/comment/15368938
Depending on how the requirement to accept the ToS is implemented, a config file might be able to disable it and any features that depend on it.
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I doubt implementation of terms will be optional.
You are all up and down these comments repeating this statement.
Why?
How exactly has Mozilla handled changes like this before that leads you to this conclusion? Do you have anything to back this up other than your own dogged insistence?
Surely there must be something I’m missing for you to be so adamant on this point. Please enlighten me, because to my knowledge about how all this works and has worked in the past this just seems like baseless fearmongering to me.
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So… entirely vibes based take. Maybe take some time to step away and come back later.
Spamming a doomerism opinion, when not backed up by anything but feelings, helps nobody. It’s an overactive immune response. The fever worse than the illness your body is trying to burn out using it.
I get that it feels like the world is going to shit, and especially when things you thought were trustworthy start doing this, it’s a blow. But this shit (repeated as fucking much as you have repeared it) makes the community, and people who need a non-corporate controlled browser, weaker and more vulnerable.
Six.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression it didn’t call out to mozilla servers if you didn’t enable sync.
I guess Mullvad would be the next popular browser yeah?
afaict Mullvad browser doesn’t support plugins which - it does some adblock by default (more ifyou have the VPN) and so on but i gots to have my DarkViewer so it’s a sometimes browser for me atm.
It does work with Firefox plugins, there just isn’t a button to open the extension “store” in the extensions settings page like stock Firefox has. You can add them by manually going to the url though, it’s just recommended that you don’t since that increases your risk of adding a malicious plugin or being fingerprinted, etc. I still added a few plugins that I really dislike not having though, like a password manager and darkreader, just because I valued the convenience slightly more than the added security.
Nice, thanks!
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What? Some proof here please. Firefox is 100% open source. You can audit the entire code for this.
It’s not like chromium with the pre-compiled binary blob in the middle provided by google.
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And again. 100% open source. There is no way for any functionality (including functionalitt that does that) to exist somewhere that people making forks can’t modify/remove it.
How good is mullvad browser?
This whole thing does not matter if you are living in the US anyway become of the Third-party doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties have "no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.
I’m about to get my tattoo removed wtf
Just get “RIP” tattooed under it.
If it’s really you…
Wtf?
Would you like to see my tattoo of Tom from MySpace I got on my left testicle? Hey man, in 2005 it seemed like MySpace Tom would be in our lives forever. Why WOULDN’T you get his profile picture inked into your body with needles on the most painful part of your body? It made sense in 2005!
But noooooooooo! Facebook had to be a dick. And now whenever I pull my pants down in front of some hot 20 year old with daddy issues, she’s like “Is that your uncle or something?”
Meanwhile Tom sold my MySpace for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now does photography of bikini models on his yacht! While I have to explain who Tom is to Gen Z…
sigh
For a second I thought Tom did photography and bikini models on his yacht. We’ll he probably does, but I just read your comment wrong.
I mean, he’s worth hundreds of millions, on a yacht that he owns with hotties in bikinis hoping to get discovered as their own ticket to fame from the photos being taken of their oiled up sexy bodies.
The sex was implied.
Honestly at this point, I wouldn’t be embarrassed having a tattoo of Tom from MySpace.
It is lmfao it was my first one 🥲
You’re a good friend
Edit: also the style shows through, not everyone can get a watercolor vibe without the water
It’s actually not watercolor, I’m just old and I don’t wear sunscreen 😂 take care of your ink, kids
I moved to LibreWolf a couple of months ago. I’ll move further away if I need to.
Am I the only one here who’s pretty much okay with this? I do wish they’d clarify exactly what they mean by “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about ‘selling data’),” but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I’ve used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I’m just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there’s something I’m missing here though.
To generalise, just as Reddit is the neolib centrist hivemind and Facebook is the conservative boomer hivemind, Lemmy is some overlap of privacy/techy/ultrapolitical groups - so whenever you get this kind of news that is ultimately pretty mild and uncontroversial to most you get lots of Lemmings buttons pushed and what seems like an oversized reaction in the comments.
Is Firefox perfect? No. Is it still the best available mainstream browser option? Yes. And if the small groups that presently use it walk away and its tiny market share (~5%) declines to a point where Firefox becomes insolvent - well then browsers will be just a two-horse race between Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit). Every web spec and page will be beholden to the desires of those companies - I’m sure the same Lemmings will be complaining about that too, and by then it will be too late to realize what they’ve lost.
It was a neolib site, but it’s starting to lean right wing, and soon will.be with the ranks of Facebook soon enough. The reason, they have been aggressively banning accounts as of late, and alot of its based around trump posts. They allow heavy astroturfing from the right, either from troll farms or conservative comments, you report them you will get banned. Many people criticized the site for pushing so many trump sanewashing posts in the front page, the conservative sub have been consistently in the front page for a while, before you almost never hear a peep from them, unless it’s being talked about in other subs
The problem I have with this is that “anonymized” data in the past has often been trivial to de-anonymize. And if they can remove some promises now, they’re going to keep going in that direction. Just like Microsoft telemetry used to be less but is getting worse and worse.
Do you have any sources about anonymized data being easy to de-anonymize? I’ve been hearing a lot of conflicting stuff regarding the policy change so I wanna make sure the information I’m getting is accurate. But yeah if Firefox implements more anti consumer policies like this I will probably be jumping ship.
There is a Wikipedia article about what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
Thanks I’ll read up on it :)
They could make it more specific. Instead they just removed it.
I’m not trying to unilaterally defend the decision, it’s just not going to make me personally switch browsers. From what I’m hearing a lot of the viable alternatives are forks of Firefox anyway.
I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It’s only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
I don’t know why they haven’t floated the idea of some kind of subscription or one-time payment (though a subscription might be just as infuriating). I’m not above paying for software and if it was a reasonable price, say $10 one-time, I’d much prefer that over it becoming the new Chrome.
Could you imagine the enshittification cries if they did this. “Mozilla to add subscription model to your browser”.
They have other products that have subscriptions you can pay for to support the company.
Instead of using Mullvad, use Mozilla VPN (it is literally exactly the same, you just pay Mozilla not Mullvad)
If you’re a web developer, Subscribe to MDN Plus.
Hate spam? Firefox Relay.
I learned more about their paid services from this one post than in the last 5 years of using their browser. Not that their browser should be constantly inundating you with ads for their other services but dang.
The problem is that none of this revenue or profit is guaranteed to go to Firefox. It goes to Mozilla and they decide how it is spent. It could go to pocket, a new overpaid CEO, or a hundred other ways that don’t benefit FOSS.
I would have donated hundreds of dollars to Firefox development already, if that were possible, but that is not an option. The only option is Mozilla, and they may spend that on anything else but Firefox.
Also Mozilla VPN is shit. It is a severely limited implementation of Mullvad, and they even enshittified their browser for it. You can only have per container VPN’s (a major gain for user privacy) if you pay for Mozilla VPN… They’ve already chosen to harm their users privacy for profit. This is the kind of shit that guarantees I will never donate as long as a for profit entity has control over Firefox, and its features.
They’re already dying. This would be throwing themselves in the grave. People aren’t used to paying for browsers
I’m pretty sure a $10 one time payment won’t pay for the costs of development that Firefox requires.
Open source only works when there are people motivated enough and skilled enough to maintain something for free or when the organization managing it has another source of income.
Chromium is bad only in your head. It’s a fucking rendering engine with different incarnations. How can this be bad? And no, FF is not “the best”, otherwise it wouldn’t have the shitty market share it actually has.
Each person has thier own opinion. I have used IE, edge, before it went chromium and have used chrome. They work, and if you get into the ecosystem they work really well, but if you don’t want to be in the ecosystem or try to stop some it, I ran into problems.
When I just accepted all google ecosystem products, chrome worked great, when I needed to use alternate google accounts for school I ran into issues. So I moved to edge and it worked fine, except for with google I ran into issues, then it became chromium.
Then ads, and popups being an ad company, google doesn’t like supporting ad or content blockers, which makes sense but ublock has been so great at blocking unwanted popups and ads and as far as I am aware it doesn’t wirk as well on chromium based browsers, or at all.
So agian Chromium is a solid system and if you don’t care to change it it can work grest for you, but I found trying to change it to suit my needs as been problematic, in ways firefox or some fork of it hasn’t been.
If you are happy with Chrome or Edge or whatnot, great, there isn’t a problem but I want other options, I want more options about how it works, how it runs on my system and what data it collects or shows, things chromium doesn’t support.
Ah silly us.
We spent a decade hating on IE, it’s slowness, poor support for any standards, plugins that fuck your shit up, etc.
But it was obviously the best because it had that huge market share.
It’s even worse. You spent several years worshipping a misguided Corp. making a mediocre browser fir laughable reasons and you have been f*cked in the end.
“Worshipping”? What online spaces have you been frequenting??
Found the t3.gg enjoyer
I don’t know what is that.
Do Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?
In theory yes. But remember that Chrome is based on Chromium which is open source. But nobody has stepped up to do a viable hard fork to take power away from Google.
Maintaining a modern browser is a huge undertaking which is why almost nobody except Google, Mozilla, and Apple are really even trying. Even Microsoft threw in the towel.
The more bad stuff is added to Firefox the harder it will be for any forks to keep up removing it while also keeping it up to date. Will anyone step up?
There are at least two projects trying. Ladybird is one and will make a splash next year. In addition, since the Servo project was adopted by the Linux Foundation it is again under active development.
Because it hasn’t been needed. Alternatives like vivaldi and brave do make some changes to allow you to disable Google services. Ungoogled chromium is also a thing.
For all the hate, Google has mostly done fine beyond a few boneheaded decisions.
Is librewolf a good alternative? Most plugins seem compatible
It’s just Firefox but you trust some nerds they’ve weeded all of Mozilla out. It comes with ublock origin installed and a simple searchbar homepage. It’s great because Firefox is great and the nerds who added value by stripping bullshit did a good job, but if Putin replaced them with some blyat and pushed an update I’m not sure I’d notice on time.
Yes, they allow full avoidance of any potential data collection through the browser, if they remove the collection features.
Mozilla would need to change their licensing terms to prevent forks from being able to remove things like that, and forks could just use the last version of the code before the license change and just backport new features.
Also Firefox is fully open source, unlike chromium which relies on a closed source binary blob in the middle. Some chromium forks have replaced the binary blob with open source code, but the default is for chromium forks to have a nice chunk in them controlled by google that no one can deeply inveatigate what it does. Firefox does not have this issue.
Mozilla can’t hide any potential data collection in Firefox due to the full open source nature (unlike chrome forks). They also can’t stop fork devs from stripping out any data collection functions. And as of today, they have not introduced any data collection that is not supremely anonymized, and they have not introduced any data collection that cannot be opted out of through the browser settings (and about:config).
I don’t believe Mozilla doesn’t have the best interests of the browser at heart, I believe that they do think their browser is the their number one product.
But that’s the problem. It’s free software, going up against a juggernaut whose browser is just another side project to drive engagement with their core product.
A juggernaut who just so happens to be one of Mozilla’s primary source of income. All it will take is a little bit of legislation somewhere in the world to make that deal less attractive and Mozilla could be dead in the water. And it will take all of those forks with it, paving the way for Google to become the true web Hegemony.
Mozilla needs to diversify to ensure they can continue to provide stewardship to the browser.
But trying to make money in 2025 just seems to summon the enshittification brigade.
Free software is not free. Someone has to make it.
Have they considered just asking for money? Also getting rid of the giant holes that they keep pouring their money into?
A lot of people love Firefox, and would happily donate. They could also trim a lot of fat at Mozilla quite easily.
Considering how critical a browser is these days.
I’m surprised there isn’t a very popular Open-Source one that everyone is using.
Ive seen a few foss options but they generally lack certain features alot of people have gotten used to either because they cant implement them or it was committed for privacy/resource reasons.
So it becomes a balance of features vs privacy and right now fire fox has been a good enough balance there hasn’t been enough backing for a “good” feature rich foss that less computer adept users can easily install and migrate to.
It’s because it’s hard to maintain a browser. There’s lots of protocols and engines and other moving pieces; I remember when web pages would render in Netscape but not Internet Explorer, for example.
We take for granted how seamless and ubiquitous the internet is, but there were lots of headaches as internet devs decided to adopt or include different users (or not).
And now, it would take a lot of effort and market upset to convince the capitalist overlords to include something new in their dev stack. The barrier to entry is monumentally high, so most people don’t bother to try inventing something better.
Some people are trying: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
Wasn’t there some stuff about the ladybird devs not too long ago?
I just hope that project doesn’t end up being the Voat or Parler of browsers.
It’s a browser, not a platform. Having a bunch of groypers use it doesn’t ruin the experience for everyone else so long as it retains good privacy features.
While I agree with this sentiment on the surface, using a privacy focused application that was built by folks who yield to cops as part of their identity doesn’t inspire long term viability in that space.
It’s the same reason I moved away from Proton when their CEO told us all where his values lie. It’s not outright backtracking on privacy promises but with so many comparable alternatives in this space, why chance it with the bootlickers?
Yeah, I have no doubt you are correct. It’s one of those situations that if it were that easy, it would already be done.
It looks as if it’s hard to maintain a browser by design by making overly complicated HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc standards.
It makes me want to spend more time using the Gemini protocol.
Yeah, the standards of the internet are just piled on top of each other. Rendering code and whatnot is the easy part. Keeping up with the standards is the hard part (or so I have read).
Don’t collect anything on your own and don’t sell the things you don’t collect. Bam, problem solved.
I remember a time when Google wrote “Don’t be evil” all over their stuff…
dude i worked in a buncha different college libraries around the time of google’s initial ascension. Google slayed. it was awesome, in 2000.
now? google is a drippy search engine.
There’s a phrase that is still very close to that in some company statement still, I sort of view it as pointless to talk about. We know they’re evil by their actions, and they were evil before they removed it in sure. If the statement is what matters, it’s still basically there, just not the motto. It’s just not worth worrying or talking about. They do so much worse shit. A friend of mine was recently let go after protesting about their response to the genocide in Gaza.
If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
Any of the Firefox forks. This is Mozilla not Firefox that is making these decisions.
zen, ladybird, waterfox are some that i’ve heard of before. zen is out now. idk about the others. one of my friends uses zen and it’s pretty neat.
zen is still unstable. random errors and bugs show up very often
Perhaps Ladybird once it’s released?
we should all support ladybird project in hope for accelerated development. alpha in 2026, beta in 2027, stable in 2028. thats a long waiting time
So sad. I have used Firefox since 2006. Today I removed it for good from all of my devices. So long old friend. I cant wait for Ladybird to release.
I don’t get how something is allowed to be labeled “free” when the terms of usage make you barter your data.
There are different kinds of free. Free beer, free speech and free weekend are three different kinds of free that software can have, but not necessarily at the same time.
I was thinking more along the lines of “install and play this free unity game while it siphons personal data off your computer and sends it back to epic servers”
They’re specifically getting something of value in return for the good or service and then claiming it’s free and that customers are not customers, merely “users.”
but all of those taste better with free beer
lolololol
promises don’t count if you delete them. everyone knows that
“If I put my wedding ring in my pocket, it’s not cheating…”
This kind of thinking shouldn’t be acceptable from a legal standpoint. Yet the courts do nothing…
In the US at least, the courts are seemingly bought out.
Sad it’s even acceptable.
Mozilla needs to understand that I don’t want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn’t even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
Nahhh, trust them, bro. People working on other things with the same product name as their company name were great people. That should be endorsement enough.
Wait. They have this ‘open source’ flag. If they wave it about - oooh, pretty - does that help?
Just uncheck all telemetry and never use an account. Its open source so it should be verifiable that data collection is turned off.
