Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
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.
That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
What operating costs? You could argue there are development costs, but development is driven by the community. The only operating costs are forced stalking behavior.
I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.
I can’t remember the details, but if I remember correctly, Firefox used to get a lot of cut from hosting Google’s ad. But Google cut that deal and Firefox lost 90% of its revenue as a result. That’s why I can’t blame Firefox for doing what they are doing at the moment.
Us users want services for free but we can’t have our cake and eat them in the current paradigm of the internet. That’s why we have to think outside the box and I advocate for a publicly funded internet. It is the same model as NPR and BBC and that is why they have little to no ads unlike private broadcasters. The same principle should be applied to the Internet if we want to keep using it for free.