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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
Think about it. Anything you type into a browser is your intellectual property, you own the copyright to it, unless you’re copying someone else’s text. In order for Mozilla to pass what you type on to any website you’re visiting, they need to “copy” that text (i.e., from the keyboard to the network).
I think this is what they’re trying to address with their legalese. It’s a pity that it has to come to this, but that’s how the legal environment is these days. They can’t afford to make expensive mistakes. Perhaps they can keep improving and clarifying the language though.
Firefox is not a legal entity needing a license. Mozilla is.
Firefox is a product, not a service.
When I write notes in a book, I do not need to give the manufacturer of that book a license for my notes. If I mail that book to a friend, I do not need to give a license for that book to the post office.
The only other software that I can think of that has taken a similar stance on TOS vs an open license is Microsoft and their VS Code product. Precompiled executables are license under a non-free (libre) license while the source code of VS Code remains under the MIT license.
The original license of Firefox MPL2 allow end users to freely use the browser, with no license needed to give to Mozilla. Thousands of open source software who all use GPL, MPL, MIT, et al. allow users to use their software however they want. The proposed TOS does not and you must abide by their Acceptable Use Policies.
Even if they require a license due to some legal reason, there is simply no reason why the license has to be a non-exclusive, perpetual license. If it really as they claim “to help you navigate the internet”, then the terms should explicitly say that, and not make it implicit.
The fact is Mozilla doesn’t need a license for me to operate Firefox locally. Any copyright claim they are making is in bad faith because anything you type into the browser would be covered under fair use. They have yet to convince me why they need a license for me to operate a browser fully locally.
The most likely reason why they are changing the license is because they want to start training AI data based on your browser habits. They may not be doing it now and they may say they have no plans to do it in the future. But the TOS, as currently written, gives them permission to do just that.
Yeah. That’s certainly a possibility. Thinking about it won’t give me the answer, though. It could be that, it could also be something else. We don’t learn the truth of what’s going on in the world by just making up a good-sounding explanation and assuming we must be right, even if that’s how people discussing things on forums largely operates.
That’s fair. But what they’ve said so far seems to strongly point at this being the reason.