When Mozilla announced their Terms of Use a few months ago, they told us that they would be asking us to acknowledge it at a later date. That day is here, and I took a quick look at it.

When Mozilla announced their Terms of Use a few months ago, they told us that they would be asking us to acknowledge it at a later date. That day is here, and I took a quick look at it.

  • jBoi@szmer.info
    4·
    11 hours ago

    Could someone explain to me why there are so many negative comments about this, calling to switch to librewolf, ect.? Having to explicitly agree to TOS is a good thing. It was weird that it wasn’t there previously and it doesn’t change the fact that you were agreeing to them implicitly by using the browser in the first place.

  • Crotaro@beehaw.org
    13·
    15 hours ago

    Alright. I had to read up again on why this is newsworthy in the first place. Because of the language in their new ToS regarding usage of user data. The article I read, asked why they would only now update their terms despite the California Privacy Act having been in effect for a while now.

    I’m very sure, optimistically assuming they are honest and really didn’t change the way they handle user data, that an auditor found the previous wording of their ToS just not clear enough. Working in Quality Management and having attended quite a number of audits, this happens all the time. Company has a process for years, sometimes decades, but then needs to change the wording in a document because a new and overly by-the-books auditor will demand such to have it not only be “correct in spirit” but also “technically correct”. Nothing in the actual process needs to change.

    Again, this is me assuming that they really havent done something different in the way they handle data. Isn’t Firefox open-source? Could some savvy code-reader go through it to see if something about the data collection has changed?

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      6·
      15 hours ago

      Could some savvy code-reader go through it to see if something about the data collection has changed?

      Yeah, I think it’s telling that it’s been a while now and nobody has pointed to any suspicious code.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      6·
      15 hours ago

      My feeling on this is basically with Mozilla potentially running advertising campaigns on their own in Firefox (especially with Google funding possibly drying up), Mozilla felt that they needed to clarify their permission for access to user data.

      Still, that doesn’t really explain why their initial terms were so over-broad in the first place – that is why everyone’s thinking went straight to AI as soon as they made their initial announcement. They haven’t deigned to provide us with an explanation for that - besides telling us that it was due to the CCPA.

      Clearly we can’t lay all the blame on CCPA, since the rights grant is more limited today than at first introduction - a fact that they readily admit.

      • Vincent@feddit.nl
        2·
        15 hours ago

        The post sounds like it the initial terms weren’t thought to be broader than the current ones, but that that apparently wasn’t clear when they were read by regular people. As a non-lawyer, it seems entirely possible to me that the legal ramifications of both versions are the same, as often things that will read one way to me, turn out to actually mean more specific things in a legal context.

        • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
          1·
          14 hours ago

          Well - I don’t know about them being the same.

          The new terms specifically disclaims Mozilla’s ownership of your data:

          This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

          which limits their license to your data to processing it for usage within Firefox or Mozilla services. That is a huge difference. I don’t see how they would be able to claim - in a clickwrap agreement - that Mozilla saying that they don’t own your data somehow grants Mozilla ownership of your data.

          That would be mind boggling.

          • Vincent@feddit.nl
            1·
            12 hours ago

            So what I think -but again, not a lawyer- is that the previous version also didn’t grant Mozilla ownership of your data. For example, maybe there was already a legal limit to what rights the ToS can transfer to Mozilla, and the new version just re-iterates the existing law?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    2·
    18 hours ago

    I just got the 138.0.3 update and restarted Firefox. No such dialog to click through, I have not clicked to agree yet. I am on Linux, where distribution maintainer created the package to install and download. Did they disable this? Or maybe I did not got this dialog as I already opted out from data collection, through the settings in Firefox.

    I’m confused.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      8·
      18 hours ago

      Oh its not enabled for Linux?

      Chris Peterson [:cpeterson] Comment 19 • 7 days ago • Edited

      For 138.0.3, next week’s dot release, we want ToS to be enabled for the following percentages of new users:

      Windows = 100% Update: stay at 50%
macOS = 25%
Linux = 0%

      For 139.0, next major release, we want ToS to be enabled for the following percentages of new users:

      Windows = 100%
macOS = 100%
Linux = 0%

      Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1959542 (Scroll down, as I don’t know how to link to this specific reply)

      • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
        4·
        18 hours ago

        Yep, it is also not enabled for Linux, and your distribution might not be using a Mozilla binary anyway.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      4·
      18 hours ago

      Right now, it is for new users only. Existing users are going to have to opt in at some later date.