Thought this might be of interest to FF users –
https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-not-to-sell-firefox-users-data/
I’m afraid I have to be educated about what exactly does “users’ data” mean in this context.
Well, I imagine it could be anything you have explicitly or implicitly given them.
Name, phone, email (if you’ve given them any of that, which you might have if you signed up for synching or VPN). IP address, timestamped sites you have visited, sites you have bookmarked.
Marketing companies can buy this info and then cross-index it with other info they have. So if you’ve given your name and personal info to some particular site, and that site sells your info, then they can work out from your ip and timestamp who you actually are. They can then have a complete kit of info to sell to the highest bidder. (e.g. “Geriatric cat owner who skydives on Wednesdays” … and someone starts getting adverts for pet food and life insurance).
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If they go that far, I wonder what implication will it have for privacy oriented Firefox based browsers, Tor Browser for example.
Those MDN analytics are very tame to be fair, and may even be of a functional nature (e.g. to display the correct avatar if you are logged into MDN).
The concern with Mozilla - and Firefox especially, is that many users (like myself) also store & sync their bookmarks, open tabs, and more between devices.
I think, a bit more context is needed.
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Techcrunch has a more detailed blog post: Mozilla responds to backlash over new terms, saying it's not using people's data for AI | TechCrunch
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The Mozilla blog post that caused the trouble: Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
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Mozillas TOS: Firefox: About Your Rights — Mozilla
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Mozillas Privacy Notice: Firefox Privacy Notice — Mozilla
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Always good to have, but as best I can tell, none of this really addresses the removal of this FAQ:
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.
I think that’s primarily what all the pushback is about.
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I still think it’s all a bit unclear it would seem like it would only be an issue if you used Firefox services as opposed to just using the browser.
Still there are plenty of other sketchy things about Firefox that have diminished its reputation, most notably the Pocket integration and continued reliance on Google for sponsoring the default search engine. Nothing to stop me from using it as my daily browser but enough to slightly annoy me.