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Nothing stings like betrayal, which is why Firefox users are furious with Mozilla after a controversial update to the developer’s Terms of Use last week. Mozilla is scrambling to smooth things over, but the damage may already be done for many former fans of Firefox.
Last Wednesday, Mozilla released a “Terms of Use” document for Firefox, a first for the open-source browser. That might sound like business as usual, but the Terms of Use include a concerning section that appears to give Mozilla broad permission to use your data, including “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.”
To add insult to injury, Mozilla also completely removed a section of its “Firefox FAQs” that included a promise to never sell user data. You can still see that section in snapshots on the Wayback Machine, but it’s been wiped from the current version of the page.
Unsurprisingly, many Firefox users were outraged with this apparent shift in Mozilla’s stance on data privacy. Mozilla updated its blog post announcing the update in an attempt to calm users’ worries, stating, “We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.”
To Mozilla’s credit, the Privacy Notice is pretty detailed. However, that still might not be enough to regain Firefox users’ trust. After all, as one Reddit user put it, “People aren’t upset about how transparent they’re being, they just want to use a browser that doesn’t collect and distribute their data. I’m no lawyer, but for example, it sounds like they have license to distribute the data below without contest.”
Firefox users are also concerned about what exactly Mozilla could do with their data within the somewhat vague bounds of “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license.” The most obvious possible explanation is some sort of AI feature for Firefox. For AI to function well, it needs to consume huge amounts of training data, and that data has to come from somewhere.
As another Reddit user pointed out, “The question no one seems to be asking is why they suddenly and desperately need rights to all of their user’s INPUTS. I strongly suspect this is ultimately about AI.”
Comments on a Mozilla forum thread included similar outrage, with one user replying, “You’re not pulling the wool over our eyes, either remove those vile terms or lose at least half your users.”
Clearly, Firefox users are not convinced by Mozilla’s attempts to “clarify” the new Terms of Use and Privacy Notice, and the potential for their data to get funneled into an unwanted AI model isn’t helping. Mozilla is at risk of losing its users: Since Firefox is open-source, any developer can freely use Mozilla’s code to make its own Firefox-based browser that these new privacy terms wouldn’t apply to. Those Firefox clones already exist, too, with Librewolf being one popular example.
As a Firefox user myself, I’m more than a little disappointed Mozilla seems to be quite literally deleting its data privacy promises. For many Firefox users, Mozilla’s attempts to clear things up may be too little, too late.
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Kurt Indovina
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