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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.
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https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.
I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.
This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.
I don’t like this but it’s gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
If you’re going to a Chromium browser, at least go to Vivaldi since it’s a) based on Chromium not Chrome and b) not based in the US.
The only bad thing it has going for it is that it uses the Chrome web store for extensions.
Mind you, this is just step one and other steps WILL follow. Mozilla looked at other enshittified products from large companies that make a lot of money and thought “we could have that too!”
It’s a pattern I keep seeing, over and over. This is the end of Firefox as we knew it. I’m sure a good fork, run by a non profit foundation will sprout soon enough, but the name for a privacy browser won’t be Firefox no more
Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn’t been keeping up with Mozilla’s many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you’d decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I’ve now moved to LibreWolf, because I don’t want to support Chromium’s dominance, but if that project dies out I’ll jump ship. It’ll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won’t be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership’s fault.
It makes me sad because I’m a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.
Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.
so is this them trying to protect its users while adding nuance for the sake of legal protections, or is this them pretending to do that in order to profit off its users?
If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
Any of the Firefox forks. This is Mozilla not Firefox that is making these decisions.
Perhaps Ladybird once it’s released?
I don’t get how something is allowed to be labeled “free” when the terms of usage make you barter your data.
There are different kinds of free. Free beer, free speech and free weekend are three different kinds of free that software can have, but not necessarily at the same time.
I moved to LibreWolf a couple of months ago. I’ll move further away if I need to.
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Why they need users ? If they operate Firefox by themselves why they not start paying for power usage for hosting Firefox on my machine.
At least Ecosia plants trees, and the way those trees produce oxygen and absorb CO2 is a benefit to me.
so long firefox👋
Where are you going?
Tor/Mullvad are the only acceptable options if you genuinely want the best for your privacy. Mullvad browser is a bit less of a hassle than Tor but not by much. If adamant about staying away from Gecko (Firefox) and Chromium browsers then WebKit forked browsers are sort of the last options.
At this point I’m beginning to look at going online as something that is inherently dangerous (for lack of a better word) and that needs to be done with care. There is no meaningful way to stay private anymore, and by connecting and interacting you are always painting a target on your back with long-lasting consequences that we can’t imagine yet. It’s not looking great right now, my dudes.
This whole thing does not matter if you are living in the US anyway become of the Third-party doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties have "no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.
I use brave and librewolf, anybody know if those are still safe from this dort of thing? (Probably not I guess, so what browsers are left?)
I’ve been annoying people with this information: Librewolf is mostly a autoconfig file for Firefox (which is a Firefox feature). https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/raw/branch/master/librewolf.cfg
I don’t get your point, are you saying that using LibreWolf will still send your personal data to Mozilla? A privacy hardened config should be enough to disable all data collection, unless there’s some kind of hidden telemetry in Firefox. That’d be hard to hide considering the open source nature of Firefox.
Also, looking at the source repo, it seems like LibreWolf is not just a config file, it’s also a bunch of patches to the source code, plus they do build from source and publish their own binaries. So if Mozilla does try to sneak telemetry in, the LibreWolf maintainers are well positioned to patch it out.
Librewolf is privacy-hardened so it’s probably the best option. Brave is Chromium-based. Realistically though, all web browsers come with compromises, and internet anonymity is virtually impossible without unrealistic amounts of effort.
Someone earlier said that brave was based on chrome and when google blocked ublock origin on Chrome, it would stop working on brave too.
People don’t like Brave because they believe it’s a crypto scam, and the CEO is a douchebag. But Brave has said they’ll continue to support extensions regardless of Google’s change.
Don’t forget the CEO’s worst crime: he’s the inventor of javascript
Also the fact that he’s a rabid homophobe and transphobe.
I didn’t know that, but tbh not surprising. Dotcom-era tech bro billionaires are all the same.
Yeah he was a big donator to California’s prop 8, which tried to ban gay marriage - it’s one of the reasons he stepped down from Mozilla.
Clearly not someone you can trust.
I have yet to see YouTube ads on brave, but are you saying that will soon cease to be the case? Bugger.
Also, Brave has really shitty features like redirecting referral codes.
Don’tbe evilDon’t collect anything on your own and don’t sell the things you don’t collect. Bam, problem solved.
