Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
can a chromium fork reasonably be maintained with adblock support?
The only acceptable privacy policy for a browser is “we won’t fucking look into anything, take anything, nor send anything anywhere you didn’t actually wish to send explicitly”.
Firefox have an extension system. If mozilla wants to bloat it, they should do it via extension, so that they’re not bloating the actually useful part. As it is, all they’re doing is forcing more work on people to manage forks to remove all the shit every time they push a release.
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
Looking forward to seeing the cope from the Mozilla fanboys for that one.
Where’s the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
I’ve been willingly enabling data collection features for Mozilla but I guess that time is revolute, they don’t feel trustworthy anymore.
Same here. Just turned off all data collection checkboxes. Fuck Mozilla!
Wtf is happening, why is now even Firefox going off the rails?
You missed the previous memo: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
probably saw all the money by having thier browsers info being sold off to companies, like with chrome, and google and reddit/OPEN AI collusion.
So now what the hell do we have to use to not be spied upon?
Well I suppose LibreWolf (or some other de-branded Firefox) will become more mainstream. Similar to what chromium is to chrome 🤷
That’s not a real equivalence.
Chromium is the basis for Google Chrome, while Librewolf is nothing more than a leech to Firefox. It’s just Firefox, rebranded.
Rebranded, pre-cleaned of all the forced stuff from mozilla, with the built-in integration of more privacy-enhancing features.
So, not “just firefox, rebranded” at all.
Soon other web engine will coming, first LadyBird browser and two is Servo Browser. But they’re still along way to go
I am still waiting desperately for a servo based browser, mozilla kicking it out was one of the reasons I lost all hope in Mozilla a while back.
Am I missing something on Servo Browser? Because when I went to check it out and seems more like next-gen browser engine that looks to be an improvement on Firefox’s Gecko. If so then we will need to wait for a browser team to adopt it.
Servo is also building a web browser UI.
But isn’t Servo funded by Mozilla
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
What the fuck?
deleted by creator
does this affect forks?
Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or “Invasion of Privacy” Policy
Oh, that last paragraph doesn’t give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:
- If you choose to use the optional AI chatbot sidebar feature, you’re subject to the ToS and Privacy Policy of the provider you use, just as if you’d gone to their site and used it directly. This is obvious.
- Mozilla will collect light data on usage, such as how frequently people use the feature overall, and how long the strings of text are that are being pasted in. That’s basically it.
The way this article describes it as “cushy caveats” is completely misleading. It’s quite literally just “If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you’re relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much.”
That’s good to know actually.
So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of. The ghost of Mitchell Baker will haunt us forever.
So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of.
You can opt out of it. You’ve always been able to opt out of Mozilla’s telemetry. Not to mention that if you actually read the Privacy Notice, there’s an entire section detailing every single piece of telemetry that Mozilla collects, and if you read the section very clearly titled “To provide AI chatbots,” you’ll see what’s collected:
- Technical data
- Location
- Settings data
- Unique identifiers
- Interaction data
The consent required for the collection to even start:
Our lawful basis
Consent, when you choose to enable an AI Chatbot.
And links that lead to the page explaining how to turn off telemetry even if you’re using the in-beta AI features.
It says they’re going to collect usage data. Nothing about opting out.
Look at the links in my comment, and you’ll see that all of the categories of telemetry data there can be opted out of with that single switch.
JFC please read the actual documents instead of going “nothing about opting out” when it’s literally right there.
They use the term telemetry in a special way. If they are collecting info from users, that is telemetry under a different name, ok fine. Not collecting info means they receive 0 bits.
I truly don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
Mozilla defines telemetry as “data collection.” Any collection of data by Mozilla is considered telemetry, as is described by the docs page that is cited on the Telemetry Collection & Deletion page.
If you deselect the Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla option, this disables all telemetry, or in other words, all data collection by Mozilla.
Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
i think MS? admitted AI isnt generating useful profit for them, yea its hype like crypto is.
Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
It just became bigger: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
100%. I can’t decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I’m at least open to it.
It’s not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
Sorry, I realized I’m using my personal jargon in public again. When I said “AI,” I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I’m talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it “ML.”
Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.
