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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I’d be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
They’re cash strapped and cash strapped companies are the worst when it comes to being trustworthy. That’s all the calculus that needs to be done.
They’re not that cash strapped though. Their blog post says that they need the revenue to ‘grow’, and they go on to talk about the new people they’ve added to the board. So it isn’t really about getting enough money to survive. It’s about getting money to support a top-heavy company structure.
How about asking for money? I’d gladly pay if they stripped out a bunch of the nonsense they do and focus on making a better browser. Or keep that crap and let me donate directly to Firefox development.
I’d gladly pay if they stripped out a bunch of the nonsense
I donate to FOSS often, but I dont have a ton of money. Most will donate nothing, and that is fine part of this is altruistic, but I think its easy to forget that donations only go so far. A web browser is also a very big project and will need a lot more funds too.
It does not help that Mozilla is in a odd situation on what they can do to raise funds and not move away from their core mission.
Google really needs to be broken up. They’ve become the Ma Bell of the internet.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
Hm. Reading further in the article and since its not the first no-no… I have doubts.
Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.
They should clarify that then. Explain any and all situations that could be considered “selling user data” and explain what data that consists of. Then explain how to avoid it.
That shouldn’t be hard.
Ok so I don’t have to change browsers?
There are no alternative browsers out there. Our situation has came down to choose one of the least evil out there.
I don’t know about you but I fulfill all my e-commerce needs with Offpunk.
I don’t like this but it’s gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
Mind you, this is just step one and other steps WILL follow. Mozilla looked at other enshittified products from large companies that make a lot of money and thought “we could have that too!”
It’s a pattern I keep seeing, over and over. This is the end of Firefox as we knew it. I’m sure a good fork, run by a non profit foundation will sprout soon enough, but the name for a privacy browser won’t be Firefox no more
Maybe. I’ll certainly check out alternatives, but I’m not panicking just yet. It’s not hard to switch browsers, so I’ll just test out options while seeing how things shake out.
And what they say about being commercially viable is true, they can’t die on this hill. It means death of complete privacy either way.
Mozilla are a non profit organisation. Their recent blog post says that they will invest in advertising to increase short-term revenue that they need to “grow”. The blog goes on to talk about the increase in board members, and new leaders being added. The CEO and these new leaders are highly paid…
To me this looks bad. It looks to me that Mozilla’s new leaders have pushed out the old; and are now moving towards advertising and selling user data not because they need it to stabilise and survive, but because they need it to pay the people making the decision to burn trust and reputation. It has become a top-heavy organisation, and greed has seeped in.
A few people will be self-enriched by this, and then the orgasation will be weaker as a result.
Another decade and we’ll be back inside libraries, let’s stock up on epubs while we still have internet browsing.
If you’re going to a Chromium browser, at least go to Vivaldi since it’s a) based on Chromium not Chrome and b) not based in the US.
The only bad thing it has going for it is that it uses the Chrome web store for extensions.
VIvaldi is cool, but its not open source. If you worry about the trustworthiness of you browser, picking an open source one would be best IMO. Among the chromium-based, there are chromium itself, brave, …
I haven’t been presented with any Ts and C’s. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?
I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.
I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.
This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.
Yep. It stinks. We’ll see if it was just a fart and it’ll go away or if they crapped and we’ll have to jump ship.
Maybe we should all throw some kind of support behind https://ladybird.org/ with an eye to the future.
That project isn’t problematic for some reason I haven’t heard about, is it?
(Problematic other than web browsers being gigantic pieces of software, and ladybrid itself not even being in alpha yet)
Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn’t been keeping up with Mozilla’s many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you’d decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I’ve now moved to LibreWolf, because I don’t want to support Chromium’s dominance, but if that project dies out I’ll jump ship. It’ll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won’t be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership’s fault.
It makes me sad because I’m a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.
Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.
Yup. I might switch to Waterfox this weekend
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Why they need users ? If they operate Firefox by themselves why they not start paying for power usage for hosting Firefox on my machine.
My thoughts as well, there is always another option
I moved to LibreWolf a couple of months ago. I’ll move further away if I need to.
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.
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,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don’t pay CEOs millions and don’t force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I’d gladly pay for Firefox that doesn’t make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL’d code that’s mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there’s projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you’re brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It’s kind of sad I don’t use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
A lot of these browsers seems to be obsessed with AI that nobody wants.
I don’t get how something is allowed to be labeled “free” when the terms of usage make you barter your data.
current acting CEO of Mozilla is Laura Chambers. An Australian native and has quite…interesting work history.
It’s weird isn’t it? how these same names keep coming up again and again…
Ebay, Paypal, Airbnb.
she would have likely worked with Thiel and Musk during her time there. I wonder if there’s any lingering commitment there?
As an Australian.Do not trust us when it comes to privacy, security especially in tech or the digital space.
We are not a nation descendant of ‘convicts’ but of prison guards and other colonial boot lickers.
We are US lite or US 10years ago or maybe their tearing ground. Can’t figure it out.
Yeah don’t trust us, we’ve gutted all forms of STEM that aren’t directly related to digging shit out of the ground for Gina Rinehart and co
Serious intellectual brain drain in this country now, we really are the US 10 years ago, hopefully the US explodes enough to stop all our idiots blindly following their jingoism to our doom
Yea I would say Usa stem is pretty neglected in some ways too, mostly the lack of career development in uni, sure you can find internships but those are rare and often hard to get for stem, additionally wet lab work is a must before graduation, and often times professors re refuse to even talk about it, because they have burned by flakey students. And it’s very limited space as well. Let’s not get started at the MS and PhD levels, whole another can of worms. You might have a better chance at a more prestigious university with more resources. Ever noticed the only successful stem are mostly foreign or/and rich people.
Glad you shared this. I hate to be That Tin Foil Hat Person but it seems really convenient that a Musk and Thiel tied CEO happens to take over the one browser base that isn’t Chromium just before people start moving to it for privacy in escalating numbers.
Man, this is very disappointed news. Thanks though, good to know.
McKinsey is honestly scarier. They may not be a household name like the others, but look them up. They are frightening.
McKinsey, you forgot that, whatever the fuck it is
shit no i shouldn’t pretended. i do NOT want to learn more. but yes, thanks for the link.
I’ve been “laid off” by a McKinsey sweep twice in my Silicon Valley career and both times the stated reason was basically for making working software instead of lying and scamming.
sorry i did try to pretend McKinsey doesn’t exist. First I heard of them was pete butigieg.
Look, being gay and married is the most pro family values position conceivable
Stanford too
Stanford is very corporate much like their counterparts
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.
what is your current open source / FOSS alternative?
