Thought this was interesting and worth knowing about
I mean, for now…
If terms of use aren’t regulated in any way apparently companies can change them whenever they fucking want to.
They can say this today and then a month from now completely backtrack just like Mozilla did…
Terms of use do not mean fucking anything.
Who is the moron at Mozilla that thought it would be a good idea to sell user information, and how much does he make a year?
$6M, but if you look at the California law that spurred this change, the Privacy Policy that hasn’t changed since July 2024, and the revised ToS, this looks mostly like a really, really, really stupid communication error.
It’s one of those cases where legally, “sell” includes things that most people wouldn’t consider a sale in normal parlance, but Mozilla has to comply with the overbroad legal definition; meanwhile, they don’t appear to be fundamentally changing anything about how they’re operating.
ETA: I’m still moving to LibreWolf (and maybe Ladybird later on). I’m not a lawyer, and expecting people like me to parse legal definitions of commonly understood words is just asinine.
The thing is, I don’t want Mozilla to be “really this shouldn’t be called selling” my info either. This was my call to jump ship to a fork that doesn’t give any data to Mozilla in the first place by adopting a downstream fork.
I probably already wasn’t giving Mozilla any data to “not sell” in the first place, since I’ve got telemetry disabled and used about:config to strip out all of their non-browsing functions. But why trust a “probably” that also inevitably needs more attention when they roll in some AI assistant nonsense I don’t want (or whatever) when I can just find a fork of their FOSS product that’s run by people that don’t want my data in the first place?
That’s kinda my feeling, too. It doesn’t appear to be any worse than a year ago, but if you were already not impressed, this is not an improvement.
where legally, “sell” includes things that most people wouldn’t consider a sale
Allowing access for valuable consideration is pretty cut and dry. What is the legislation defining beyond that?
To quote this wiki that did a very good job of breaking down this clusterfuck:
The CCPA defines “selling data” as:
“Sell,” “selling,” “sale,” or “sold,” means selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by the business to a third party for monetary or other valuable consideration.
The sticking point is that last “other valuable consideration.” The question that people should be asking is: “valuable to whom and in what capacity?” Value does not need to be for financial gain; knowledge is valuable to a contractor building a building, for example.
But I recommend reading that wiki breakdown or just watch this video. It’s a mess that can’t be untangled in a simple Lemmy comment.
I don’t want Mozilla to be handling my personal data in any way. Anonymized usage statistics? I could be convinced to relinquish that. But that’s it.
From what I understand, usage stats are anonymized, and you can opt out of telemetry. But as I personally move to more hardened and private ways to connect, I’m moving to LibreWolf to err on the side of caution.
It all feels like flying too close to the sun for my taste. I don’t like the idea of normalizing policies that aren’t cut and dry and easy to understand. Have a legal version and a version for dumb people like me if needed, but don’t expect me to play lawyer and connect the dots.
Yes, you can opt out, you simply send an request with your data to Alphabet INC.
I’m with you. Those TOUs are unacceptable.
legally,“sell” includes things that most people wouldn’t consider a sale in normal parlance
Like what, any specific examples?
I have been hearing this repeatedly as a talking point from people defending Firefox but without any specific example of what they do and don’t allow themselves to take and sell, it rings quite hollow.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
If they give anybody any information for any reason, they open themselves to litigation - however frivolous and unwarranted - because the laws are written to be intentionally vague, to capture a wide variety of scenarios, including those that the law does not explicitly state. There are tons of valuable exchanges that could occur other than strictly data for money, and those exchanges are therefore captured within this new legal definition. To protect themselves from frivolous lawsuits and to remain consistent within the new definitions of these laws, Firefox/Mozilla has changed their Terms of Use. Their uses of data are outlined within their Privacy Policy (linked within the above post).
I suppose this information is only valuable if one trusts Mozilla - one of the most stalwart, dedicated, and outspoken advocates for consumer rights in the digital age.
I’m not saying Mozilla is infallible or above reproach - nobody/nothing is or should be considered so - but if I’m gonna trust any group that says “I’m not fucking you over” it’s gonna be the group that has a consistent and very clear history of championing the idea of not fucking people over
Doesn’t the new wording also include monetary exchange as well. Wouldn’t that mean they could sell your data at anytime even if they are currently not?
They could tell us precisely what they’re selling, and to whom, and give us a button to say “hell no”, and it’d be largely fine. Instead, it’s a bunch of “oh, you wouldn’t understand”
To be clear, I’m not particularly interested in defending Mozilla. This confusing mess is at least partly their fault, and I think users are right to hold them accountable. I just want people to be able to make informed decisions and not ones based on the internet blowing things up needlessly.
Rather than repeat myself, here’s my comment to someone who asked basically the same thing.
Ladybird is interesting, but not ready to be a daily driver yet.
Alpha release is expected in 2026, it isn’t trying to be ready yet, and I love that.
I’d rather have something fully cooked than half-baked.
You’re missing the point:
It isn’t supposed to be ready, of course you’d rather have something ready. Ladybird is not even available yet unless you’re building from source to test the pre alpha progress
Okay but nobody in this thread criticized Ladybird for being incomplete. It was only mentioned by someone who dropped Firefox for Librewolf as something on their radar to maybe switch to in the future when it’s complete. If someone wants to swap browsers right now, Ladybird is not a reasonable consideration, but people are keeping it in the conversation as something to follow in the future.
Is Librewolf comparable with the rest of my Firefox add-ons?
Yeah and it comes with ublock origin as the only pre-installed extension.
It’s a drop in replacement. It’s pre hardened so you may want to relax the settings a bit to get some comfort (at the expense of privacy). But otherwise you’ll feel right at home.
Yes, it should be. From what I can tell, it’s a tweaked Firefox.
Thunderbird May Disclose Information To: Mozilla Affiliates: Thunderbird is a project of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation and an affiliate of Mozilla Corporation, and as such, shares some of the same infrastructure. This means that, from time to time, your data (e.g., crash reports, and technical and interaction data) may be** disclosed to Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation**. If so, it will be maintained in accordance with the commitments we make in this Privacy Notice.
DNS servers, Standard Autoconfiguration URIs, and Mozilla’s Configuration Database: To simplify the email set-up process, Thunderbird tries to determine the correct settings for your account by contacting Mozilla’s configuration database as well as external servers. These include DNS servers and standard autoconfiguration URIs. During this process, your email domain may be sent to Mozilla’s configuration database, and your email address may be disclosed to your network administrators.
Amazon Web Services: Thunderbird uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host its servers and as a content delivery network. Your device’s IP address is collected as part of AWS’s server logs.
Email address providers (Desktop Only Legacy): Prior to version 128, Thunderbird partnered with Gandi.net and Mailfence to allow you to create a new email address through Thunderbird. If you choose to use this feature, your email address search terms are sent to Gandi.net and Mailfence to return available addresses. In addition, your country location is also shared to provide the correct prices. You can learn more about Gandi.net’s and Mailfence’s data practices by reading their privacy notices.
Always good to read TOS and PP of an service.
I’m always confused when people are surprised by something like an account sync meaning that the operators have to store your data
Makes me wonder if they understand how Lemmy works…
Yes, naturally to create an account for Sync, they have to store your data. But it’s not the same if they also share these with third parties.
If third parties means AWS, then every website you’ve accessed this year shares your data with third parties. This is why the GDPR exists.
Yes, but this is a different thing. It’s clear that you are not private, even using TOR, if you use Google for search, post on Fakebook or use another page/service which logs and profile your activity, but it’s different if the browser itself or/and its company is tracking you, sharing it with third parties. That is the point. GDPR limit this to an minimum, but don’t avoid it completely. More than ever is important that you ALWAYS read TOS and PP of every app/service before using it. A good rule is: longer and more written in a legal jargon, difficult to understand and many external links, it is a sign that the app or service is trying to hide its activities and dark patterns by boring the user. A honest app/service don’t need this tricks, using a short and clear text.
Are you under the impression that what you quoted is a long or unclear text?
That of Mozilla is enough clear, although not much better with several external links that must be checked separately. But in general it is a fairly valid rule that the site has things to hide if it puts a very long legal text. A normal user does not bother to read a text of 2 or more pages in a difficulty legal jargon.
Honest sides don’t need to do it, good examples are the PPs of the SSuite (the shortest ever) or Andisearch, which are between the bests I know.
Depends. Every hostname accessed? Sure. Every full URL? Not with https being everywhere these days.
Not a counterpoint, but to extend a bit on how it could be done: encrypted data. Or, self-hosting server part available, like Mozilla’s (i.e. GarduaLinux has a fork of Librewolf/ Floorp, called Firedragon which uses their own firefox server for account sync)
Oh…
The Vivaldi browser has an inbuild Mail client, which share nothing to third parties. Vivaldi is complete independent from third party investors and share nothing with other companies.
Vivaldi? The closed source browser? How do you know it shares nothing?
Because it’s an independent employee owned cooperative from Norway, without any extern investors. It don’t need to share data to make money. It’s business model is different from sharing userdata.
PP
At Vivaldi Technologies AS (“Vivaldi AS”), protecting your privacy is a top priority. We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.
Tests (Webbkoll, Blacklight)
It is currently much more important to promote EU products to break the hegemony of the great US corporations. Vivaldi (Norway), along with Mullvad (Sweden) and Konqueror (Germany) are the only relevant browsers in the EU, after the disconinuated since some years UR Browser (France). As said, Vivaldi also include an inbuild Mail client and Feed reader, so are no need to use Thunderbird or other extern app.
I very much agree with this. Not all closed software means it’s “evil”. Look at obsidian for example that’s closed source but ut has a widely accepted user base nonetheless. Vivaldi is a great browser choice and way within my “threat model” at least.
That is the point, it’s not so important that a few % of the UI source of an browser is proprietary or not, way more important for the user are the ethics and transparency of an company
Yeah! Obviously not for everyone - but i do think people should re-consider their initial judgments. Just like I recently decided to switch to Fastmail away from Proton. I did some research around Fastmail, and to me, their missions and values won me over. For example, they help develop open standards such as jmap over imap. They own all of their own hardware - and encrypt all data at rest. Might not suit everyone, but defo suits me well and it’s been a very nice experience so far.
your network administrators
What does network administrators mean in this context? Your ISP?
The person who manages your router
lol, what a shitshow. A product from the same company is distancing from the stench. Good on them, but it shows who did some things wrong.
If I remember correctly, Thunderbird isn’t a Mozilla product anymore but it’s maintained by the community. Mozilla just hosts it.
It was community maintained, then MZLA Corp was formed under the Mozilla Foundation. Deals to house Thunderbird under other foundations fell through, which is why it’s still under the Mozilla Foundation.
MZLA is a different subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.
It’s a different piece of software. It makes no sense for them to adopt the Firefox Terms of Use, no matter how they might think of them.
This whole thing is concerning. Are there other real alternatives to FF or Chromium?
Forks.
I finally switched from Firefox to librewolf, which is a privacy focused fork of it. It’s basically Firefox with some of the iffy stuff ripped out, and with good default settings.
Firefox with proper settings is probably “fine” still, but the transition is super easy since it’s basically the same thing.
Creating a browser from scratch is a monumental task, ladybird is such a project which has been in progress since ~2022, and will probably take another couple before it’s at beta. Optimistic release is 2028, or ~6 years of development.
I’ve moved to schizofox (NixOS) but there are plenty of other forks available which remove telemetry and other default behaviours from Firefox.
Chromium forks are another alternative however due to chromiums dominance in the browser space I’m reluctant to shoutout any forks.
Only other alternatives I know are either Safari if you’re on an apple device or something like Links/Links2/Lynx if you don’t mind text based browsers. Neither are convenient for their own reasons, but it’s not like we have any other choices. At least not that I’m aware of.
Wasn’t sure if there were better places to post this, feel free to cross-post if you know other fitting communities :)
Thank you for posting it by the way. This is both good, and important news
Cross posted to [email protected], and looks like someone already shared it on [email protected]
No one uses Thunderbird anymore anyways, which doesn’t matter as the ToS changes to Firefox are a nothing burger and won’t dissuade millions of people using it daily despite what the neck beards on Lemmy would have you believe.
Thunderbird actually had a big resurgence a little while back, I use it as my mobile client 🤷♂️ If I understand correctly it’s not actually a directly Mozilla project anymore.
Personally I’m less bothered by the terms of use changes specifically than the bigger picture of mozilla consistently making choices that confuse or raise eyebrows with their core audience, letting their browser languish from a technical standpoint, and making confusing business choices that don’t seem to help their financial future at all while paying executives huge salaries
I use it as my mobile client 🤷♂️
Same here and I’m glad you posted this info
No one uses Thunderbird anymore
You pulled this out of your ass?
Thunderbird currently has millions of users.
I understand why people are so mad at Firefox/mozilla but honestly? I just don’t know of any viable alternative right now. Chrome, Safari, edge, etc are all categorically worse offerings because of their parent companies/policies.
Can someone please give me a non-chromium, Mobile and browser desktop suggestion? Firefox has so many QoL things I depend on. I need something that can use major extensions and such.
Edit: iOS is the real issue here for me
Mozilla’s new TOU only covers pre built Firefox executables, not the source code.
Librewolf and Waterfox are good forks that would not be bound to the TOU.
Yes, but the problem isn’t really the browser itself, it’s Mozilla which has turned in an advertising company, supported by Google and another ad company. If you need to sync your data and want to stay private, you have to do it with an third party or selfhosted cloud service, independend which FF fork you use.
Thanks for an actual answer
You’re welcome. I’ve been covering this issue since it’s been announced. There are a number of accounts who are either deliberately spreading misinformation or who have a very poor understanding of how software licenses work.
Anyone who tells you that these terms are normal for a locally run browser is making the posts in bad faith.
Thanks for further explaining.
I’ve been super frustrated by lemmy posting vague info then going to watch some Linux and selfhosting YouTubers for them to only explain or gossip the issue for 20 minutes without alternatives.
So far trying librefox.
Librewolf btw.
I’ve personally moved to Waterfox and very much enjoying the experience, with a few hiccups.
My lord, you’re the one who misunderstands licenses. And all internet browsers are “locally run” that’s literally what makes them browsers. They browse non-local resources.
Just for one major example, literally chrome has a ToS.
You’re the one arguing in bad faith. Holy shit you’re spreading so much misinformation it’s astounding.
Those don’t work on iOS sadly and it’s a bit of a workaround to get on MacOS.
Do you see installing a .dmg file (or installing through homebrew) on macOS as a workaround, or what do you mean? I’m not sure I have ever installed a single app from their store, so maybe it’s just that such a “workaround” feels normal to me, but scary to others?
I am very comfortable with dmg lol the issue is iOS
The Walled Garden is actually the problem, then.
Ok… I have a Linux machine too. But I need apple devices for my work as well. I’m asking for solutions not “ditch your phone and computer for different ones.”
Sorry, wasn’t trying to agitate, just spewing on the Net.
Not a lot of options for iOS. There’s Tor browser and Brave that I know of. Brave is surprisingly good, but I don’t do a lot of serious navigation in the phone, and tend to favor private mode so the tracking gets deleted once I close the tab.
There may be Mac specific browsers that might be a better fit. I don’t use a Mac personally but could be worth going through the App store to see what is out there.
Why use the App Store for that? https://librewolf.net/installation/macos/
Librewolf is a fork of Firefox.
From their site:
LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM.
In the future, Ladybird or a browser built on top of Servo might be alternatives, but both projects are pretty far from being usable right now.
Appreciate the suggestion but iOS. Silly of me to forget that in the initial comment
On iOS your option is Safari and that’s what you’ve been using, even if the icon says Firefox or Chrome or Brave. It’s against Apple store TOS to have a web browser with an engine in it - they all have to be skins for Safari (Webkit). Different “iOS Browsers” will offer features on top of the Safari that actually does the browsing though, like account sync or built-in ad filtering.
The only platforms out there that are more hostile to open source software than iOS are like, game consoles.
Yes I am aware
I know pretty much nothing about iOS, but isn’t Safari actually considered a pretty decent browser? Can you not use ublock (or equivalent), and other privacy extensions, on Safari?
Any downstream fork of Firefox. All the good of Firefox and Gecko (including addons), none of the Mozilla corporation. The most popular ones seem to be Waterfox and Floorp (for “most users”) and LibreWolf for privacy diehards.
You can copy your Firefox profile folder directly into a fork’s profile folder and have everything exactly as you left it (though doing this to Librewolf will likely overwrite some of Librewolf’s privacy-first default settings like purging history every time the browser closes)
On iOS you are already stuck with every browser being a Safari+Webkit skin. Even Chrome “Isn’t chromium” on iphones. But mobile iOS “Firefox” can still use Mozilla (or self-hosted) sync to desktop Waterfox (etc).
The only alternative is the Konqueror browser (KDE) for the Linux user, it has it’s own KHTML engine by KDE (Grandfather of WebKit and Blink)
I am trying Floorp as of yesterday. I like Zen Browser, but their github contributers list makes it look like it’s mostly the effort of one person and that always gives me pause until somethings been around a while. Floorp seemed more spread out so I decided to try it despite its silly name.
I’m interested in how ladybird shapes up.
Worth noting that you may have DRM issues on some forks with video content. I don’t think you will on Linux, and someone clear this if you can, but I think the alternate used can’t do 4k video? I’m not a big web media consumer so idk. Has something to do with Widevine I think.
I am also rooting for ladybird but yeah sadly not ready yet
Based.
Great! I’m very happy with Thunderbird and with all this Mozilla nonsense i was worry that I had to leave it.
Good to know that they’ll be training AI on its users only on their browser. What a relief /s
Thunderbird’s been isolated and isolated itself from wider Mozilla from sometime, so this doesn’t surprise me. It belongs to a different subsidiary and everyday it becomes more separated from other Mozilla products. It’s just there.
deleted by creator
