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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • afronaut@lemmy.cafe
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    2 days ago

    Do Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      2 days ago

      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?

      • theherk@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

      • zecg@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        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.