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 An archived version from January 30 says: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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    9 hours ago

    current acting CEO of Mozilla is Laura Chambers. An Australian native and has quite…interesting work history.

    1000001226

    It’s weird isn’t it? how these same names keep coming up again and again…

    Ebay, Paypal, Airbnb.

    she would have likely worked with Thiel and Musk during her time there. I wonder if there’s any lingering commitment there?

    • Kurroth@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      As an Australian.Do not trust us when it comes to privacy, security especially in tech or the digital space.

      We are not a nation descendant of ‘convicts’ but of prison guards and other colonial boot lickers.

      We are US lite or US 10years ago or maybe their tearing ground. Can’t figure it out.

      • Fashim@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        Yeah don’t trust us, we’ve gutted all forms of STEM that aren’t directly related to digging shit out of the ground for Gina Rinehart and co

        Serious intellectual brain drain in this country now, we really are the US 10 years ago, hopefully the US explodes enough to stop all our idiots blindly following their jingoism to our doom

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      McKinsey is honestly scarier. They may not be a household name like the others, but look them up. They are frightening.

    • GoldenQuetzal@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Glad you shared this. I hate to be That Tin Foil Hat Person but it seems really convenient that a Musk and Thiel tied CEO happens to take over the one browser base that isn’t Chromium just before people start moving to it for privacy in escalating numbers.