Mozilla’s New Terms of Use are out of step with Firefox’s Direct Competition
Mozilla’s New Terms of Use are out of step with Firefox’s Direct Competition
On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
From the article, what appears directly after the colon...
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.
The whole article is worth reading, especially the part where Microsoft says it doesn't own your content. Seems they're aware of Safe Harbor laws.
I refuse to have an involved conversation about this. Mozilla is out of line here and we all know it.
I don't know what the fuck the top muckety-mucks think is going to happen, but they're complete idiots either way.
Get ready for ads as well
They removed this:
{ "@type": "Question", "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "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. " } },This is a nothingburger. It is, exactly, the type of boilerplate license wording used whenever a user sends anything to someone's service. The linked article is to a non-lawyer saying that it's weird that Mozilla doesn't explicitly point out that they don't own your content.
Duh. It's a license. It never means they own your content. This is crystal clear if you understand legalese.
Might this still mean that they will serve ads in the future or make AI personas out of you? Sure. It might also mean that they're going to make lawn mowers.
I've been following this story for the last couple of days, and I disagree. For one thing, most users don't consider a web browser's job to be "sending anything to someone's service"; it's local software that runs on your machine. There's no reason for somebody else to gain a license to the things you create on your own computer just because you created it inside a specific piece of software, but these Firefox terms are written extremely broadly, such that Mozilla would have a license to use this post I'm writing right now if I happened to type it into Firefox (for reference, I did not).
Besides which, there is additional context here like the many changes made in this pull request (16018). This PR removes a whole bunch of language saying that Mozilla doesn't sell your data, implying that they're either about to start selling the data you put in via Firefox, or at the very least that they're open to it. Here's all the parts that were removed by the above-linked PR:
Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data.
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.
The Firefox browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Is Firefox free? Yep! The Firefox browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
All of this taken together can really only mean that Firefox wants to sell the data you enter into your personal web browser running on your computer.
You’re talking about a specific service which they don’t name. They are talking about the generic usage of Firefox which is concerning since they bought an ad company and want to do AI.
Sure, but the license is limited to uses that “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
Not sure how ads would help with that.
AI? Sure, if an AI solution did those things. But it wouldn’t be them training on your data. This would be them using your data in AI-powered services, whether that be search (especially relevant if Google is mandated to stop paying them to default to Google); automatic categorization of your web browsing to make Containers more streamlined and effective; or even just having a completely opt-in AI assistant chatbot that can access data entered elsewhere in Firefox once you activate it.
Worst case I suspect whatever they add will be things you can simply turn off in settings. Ideally it would be opt-in, of course, or at least prompted-opt-out and disabled until first use.
And there are plenty of things that aren’t ad or AI-related that this could apply to. Heck, this could be part of a step to consolidate licenses for other products - VPN, Pocket, email anonymizers, etc. - and to enable deeper integration of those into Firefox.