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Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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"I am doing things that are not selling your data which some people consider to be selling your data"
Why is he so cryptic? Neil, why don't you tell me what those things are and let me be the judge?
Some jurisdictions classify "sale" as broadly as "transfer of data to any other company, for a 'benefit' of any kind" Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as "the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue."
To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.
I think this is a reasonable explanation.
But I also believe a large part of the firefox user base does not want any data about them collected by their browser, no matter if it is for commercial purposes or simply analytics / telemetry. Which is why the original statement "we will never sell any of your data" was just good enough for them, and anything mozilla is now saying is basically not good enough, no matter how much they clarify it to mean "not selling in the colloquial sense"
Which is a ridiculous thing to want for most users and exposes how little so much of the self-identified "techie" crowd actually understands about how this stuff works.
The first 6 years of Firefox were done without telemetry and after it was implemented it was opt-in for a while.
While I see the use of telemetry for development purposes, I would not call it aridiculous thing to not want
I more meant that the average user actually wants a significant amount of data collection and telemetry, as part of their normal web usage. There are some true privacy geeks who are actually maintaining near-anonymity on the modern internet, but there's a lot of people who get riled up about things like this while using Android phones, or signing up for loyalty programs, using corporate social media, etc.