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@pluralistic @mozillaofficial in the way you’re least expecting it!

@inpc @pluralistic @mozillaofficial

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

Did the people responsible for Biden’s messaging jump over to Moz?

(disclaimer, I worked at nscp and i want moz to succeed, despite themselves)

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

"Anonymizing" is nonsense in this context; they're providing user data to 3rd parties in exchange for something. This is a "sale" as reasonable people would understand it.

"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)."

@crecente @pluralistic @mozillaofficial What next? We find out they get paid half a billion dollars a year from Google and wouldn’t exist otherwise?

@pluralistic Mozilla leaves your data in a hollow tree in a nearby park, and then two weeks later it finds a fat brown envelope stuffed with dollar bills under the doormat. The two events could be quite unrelated, so it's hard to show that Mozilla’s really SELLING the data, per se.

Your data wants to be free. Mozilla accepts modest contributions to cover the costs of giving your data its liberty.

Mozilla is paid exclusively in eggs and maple syrup. It's more like barter than an actual sale.

@angusm @pluralistic lmao this is the best

@angusm @pluralistic Aren't eggs the new oil?

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial a lot of us are right there with you. I ran a poll and most people are considering a change in browsers after this TOS update.
@boilingsteam has interesting insight on this as well.
Edit: to clarify "most people" are of those of took the poll and it was a small sample size.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Ladybird is a wildly audacious project, creating a fully independent browser in 2024, but I really like their commitment to true nonprofit governance, and people who have already built operating systems from scratch do tend to possess follow-through...

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial "we promise we're not gonna do what you think we're gonna do, but we're not gonna tell you what we're going to actually do" shady af, poor communication at best

ima start packing

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial i'm slowly moving my bookmarks to Tor browser. But I don't know much about Tor, is it better and safer? Will it stops websites from tracking, pushing ads on me and selling my data? I hate ads.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial I have no clue. I moved over to LibreWolf instead.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Can I raise a thought, not as an accusation, but as a question of 'is this a valid concern?'

We always assume data is for advertisers selling AI penis pills, but politics is big money. Possibly bigger.

If political parties or the like wanted to pay good money to profile the people who are trying not to be profiled, wouldn't buying Mozilla data be invaluable?

Especially since Big Tech is rapidly aligning with the new regime, it's hard to shake the thought.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Bafflegab of the highest quality; whatevs. Bye Moz, I'm out.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

They explained it in a blogpost that almost nobody read because it came too late and apparently isn’t linked in the right places:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial The way people who /buy/ data think about it, obvs.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial They are selling trends, like how many people clicked on an ad.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Well yes, if it's worth something to the data market, then it's worth protection for the user.

The value of that data, whether anonymized or identifiable, translates into consumers paying (more).

It's leveraging gateway privilege, part of the 'walled garden' strategy.

Based on all their communications in the past few years I perceive that they are trying to set themselves up to be an advertising platform.

Your search queries and anything else you type in the url bar, for example, will be analyzed and the results shared with advertisers — without telling them more than what they need to know to best enhance your web experience with ads, so your privacy remains protected. This system will make Firefox commercially viable by rapidly shrinking its userbase down to a more sustainable size.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial The whole thing is the wrong question. IDGAF if they're selling it or not. The problem is that they're claiming a right to even have it. Mozilla is not party to anything we do with Firefox, but they're trying to insert themselves there, and they can fuck right off about that.

You can't sell something you don't have. The problem isn't the selling but the having.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Their overall language makes it sound like they're selling telemetry data which is weird and intrusive in a slightly different way than is typical.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial it's pretty obvious they winked and smiled while they were writing this.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

Here’s a question — Mozilla is motivated by money to be “viable” — if every user paid $1/month, they’d be overflowing with cash. How many people need to spend $10/month to adequately fund Firefox to be a private and secure browser?

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial they’re probably using it to train ai models if not selling it

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial smells like selling training data to LLM companies or training LLMs themselves to sell as a service.

Also i absolutely resent the "oh, we are so sorry you were confused by our statement"

I HATE that patronizing double speak corporate PR bullshit.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Apparently it has to do with CCPA’s definition of “selling data” which simply includes data being transferred to any third party for any reason. Because Mozilla uses tools for collecting usage metrics and has some marketing and tracking stuff built in, any third party involved in this would receive this data, and the CCPA considers this “selling data”.

It can apparently be so over-broad that service providers have included this kind of language simply for your data being hosted in their services in a third party provider like Hetzner, AWS, etc.

So it appears to be some potentially over-broad definitions in law.

@bedast @pluralistic @mozillaofficial Couldn't they have just been mildly more specific in the privacy policy to state as such to avoid such a panic response?

A lot of these laws could be complied with easily by explicitly listing what is collected, how it is processed/anoymized, and who/what/how it's shared. In other words, proper disclosure instead of masking with legalese to avoid it.

@bedast @pluralistic @mozillaofficial I don't buy it, sorry to say. There are graceful ways for orgs + lawyers to handle this. Rather than a broad clause like that, you can separate collection & usage into sections and describe it.

For ex, in cases where data is necessary for payment processing, email subs etc my orgs specify that collection + usage and the reason it's warranted.

Mozilla does telemetry I won't do, but still could've written that in specific terms. No one would have bat an eye.

@profdiggity @bedast @pluralistic @mozillaofficial

The question I have is what contract lawyers might make of the "and never will" and "that's a promise" bits of the old statement.

It was taken by the users as a binding commitment. We agreed (as much as anybody really does with shrink-wrap*) to those terms.

*One day I need to see this argument taken to a real judgement instead of a slimy settlement. A contract requires equity and a meeting of minds, not drive-by binding of victims.

@profdiggity @pluralistic @mozillaofficial There have certainly been arguments that Mozilla communicated this poorly. They used boilerplate legal nonsense in their terms of use that tends to frighten a lot of people who don’t understand that hosting solutions such as AWS are “third parties” which you have to disclose sharing data to.