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.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
Damn we really can’t have anything nice.
sometimes bound to give, if firefox isnt taking in money from having no ads, to having ads. they are going to need tons of ads, and the ability to sell your browser info for money, much like chrome is doing. surprised its taken this long to finally say “private donations isnt enough”
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.
/usr/lib/firefox-esr/browser/features
has- formautofill@mozilla.org.xpi
- pictureinpicture@mozilla.org.xpi
- screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat-reporter@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat@mozilla.org.xpi
hey, why is this significant? I can guess what features these are linked to, but is there any significance to the email address-like formats?
They are the demanded features-as-extension, shipped by default. They do that since they got rid of XUL i think?
About the @, no clue.
Guys Mullvad browser and Librewolf exist.
LibreWolf is annoying in that it doesn’t work on my Mac with VPN split tunneling, a seemingly known issue they haven’t fixed.
Zen Browser too
Do they support ubo?
they’re firefox forks and ubo comes automatically installed with them.
I have librewolf, don’t use it much. Is it functionally the same as FF? In terms of plug-in and website compatibility.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
It’s basically the same, but the devil is in the detail. DRM disabled from the get go, which is a show stopper for some sites (say, netflix). Some sites will bork themselve on the strange user-agent. Some advanced privacy features are quite hard to disable willingly, which may or may not be a good thing if you actually have to get things done on sites that breaks.
One would argue that sites that breaks when privacy features are enforced are not worth it, but you don’t always have a choice in that regard.
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
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.
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!
and then, “uh, we are removing the URL bar in the next version because our statistics say nobody uses it!!”
and then, “uh, we are removing the URL bar in the next version because our statistics say nobody uses it!!”
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or “Invasion of Privacy” Policy
Wtf is happening, why is now even Firefox going off the rails?
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?
probably anti-detection browser that ban evaders are using on reddit. its a little more complicated to get to that point though.
Well I suppose LibreWolf (or some other de-branded Firefox) will become more mainstream. Similar to what chromium is to chrome 🤷
In the good/bad old days a web page was just text and images but now a browser is a platform for running software. Each website can do useful computing for the user but the software author is in control and always tempted to make it run for them at the expenve of the user.
Crazy idea, maybe we shouldn’t use web browsers.
Soon other web engine will coming, first LadyBird browser and two is Servo Browser. But they’re still along way to go
soon! they can come any year now!
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.
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.
Librewolf is still a good alternative
What the fuck?
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Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
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.
i think MS? admitted AI isnt generating useful profit for them, yea its hype like crypto is.
It’s not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
i know, but companies still think AI is a replacement of : software engineers, programmers down the line, and outsourcing all thier CS. instead its just rehashing other AI content into its own. they have a place for answering simple questions, or pulling up complex programs
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.
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
