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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

  • wall_panel_96@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    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?)

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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.

    • vinay_clubsall@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Someone earlier said that brave was based on chrome and when google blocked ublock origin on Chrome, it would stop working on brave too.

      • cultsuperstar@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        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.

      • wall_panel_96@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        I have yet to see YouTube ads on brave, but are you saying that will soon cease to be the case? Bugger.

      • gamer@lemm.ee
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        2 hours ago

        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.

        • ded@lemy.lol
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          25 minutes ago

          I’m in a doomer mindset. We will wait and see. I was around at the start of librewolf, came from what is now arkenfox. I had to discover numerous (new) prefs these projects didn’t cover, which were later added to them. They are great efforts, don’t get me wrong. Even if the problem were just prefs, catching up to firefox development takes people’s free time. Librewolf doesn’t even handle (much) code.