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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    my other comment is here about the acting CEO of Mozilla, Laura Chambers, and asking about potential connections to Musk and Thiel.

    https://lemmy.world/comment/15382904

    I just got an alert that I need to update my FF browser before March 14th. that’s another date that keeps coming up.

    March 14th is the

    • date of the next government shutdown due to budget negotiations
    • 53 days after trump took office (same amount of days it took Hitler to destroy German democracy before WW2
    • date that a major root certificate ends on(what once was) one of the most privacy focused browsers that will break existing add-ons and potentially break/expose you online
    • date of a total lunar eclipse (it perfectly frames the US in the middle, serious go look it up)

    don’t forget that the ides of march is march 15th, as well as March is named after Mars the God of War.

    I’m no mystic, but symbolism is important to megalomaniacs.

    anyone else know of other important technological or political events happening on March 14th?