this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago (23 children)

The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:

  1. 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.
  2. 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."

[–] Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (22 children)

The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.

[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 0 points 1 week ago (21 children)

I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I'd view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don't use, and thus, I simply won't use them.

This would be a problem for me if it was an "assistant" that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer "help," but it's not. It's just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you'll never have to look at it.

It's not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it's just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don't want to use it, then you ideally won't even see it open during your use of Firefox.

[–] Earflap@reddthat.com -1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

NOOOOOOO AI BAD ALL THE TIME THERE ARE NO CONCEIVABLE USE CASES FOR AI ITS ALL SLOP NOOOOOOO

[–] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Give an example, a first-person example, where it is not slop.

[–] 9bananas@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

as a glorified search engine, after pretty much all search indexes were neutered on purpose...but even then it's...mostly passable, but always untrustworthy.

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