4 ms·

It's not that you can just install LibreWolf and forget about it forever. If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight

by zb3 2y ago

It's not that you can just install LibreWolf and forget about it forever. If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival. Someone needs to fund the actual browser development.. it's possible to avoid your data being used, but it only works because data of others is monetized.

db48x 2y ago
> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival. So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions. For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  Your statements do not align with the reality of Firefox’s own words. They are trading/selling your data and they updated their ToS to reflect that. “ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar” https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms... This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
  - db48x 2y ago
    But that has nothing to do with the new language that was added to the ToS, which states: > You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content. This new license to the data that you enter into the browser is only for local operation of the browser itself, not for ads or sponsored suggestions. In addition to that license, they also use the words that you type into the urlbar or search box to customize the ads and search suggestions that you see. It is important to keep these two things separate, because only one of them is new. The other has been there for years.
    - joeyh 2y ago
      Nothing in the ToU says this is local only or not for ads.
      - db48x 2y ago
        Of course it does. It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage. Just for Firefox to follow your instructions. You type in a url, and it navigates to the url for you and saves it in your history. You type in some form data, and it submits it for you and saves it for later.
        nickthegreek 2y ago
        > It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage. It does not. That is explicitly stated as a subset of their rights. Before that sentence you might notice: “This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.” So check the privacy notice and you find… “How we use data We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business” So they can use the data in anyway that helps sustain the business.
        alt227 2y ago
        > We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business I would say that those 3 vaguely worded things pretty much cover them to use consumer data in any way they want.
        nickthegreek 2y ago
        Exactly.
        eipi10_hn 2y ago
- Dwedit 2y ago
  Typing on your own computer, and having the draft stored into local storage requires absolutely no policy at all. If anyone else's computer is involved with that, then it's a problem. Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".
  - db48x 2y ago
    I agree with you, but it seems that a lot of lawyers do not. Most of the other browsers have the same language in their ToS, as do many programs like Microsoft Office.
  - zb3 2y ago
    Exactly, Mozilla just tries to mislead people that their "web services" are indivisible parts of Firefox, but they're not, for me it's a software running on my computer.
    - db48x 2y ago
      I don’t think that they are trying to mislead at all. At no point do they call Firefox a service. Instead they call Pocket a service, and their VPN a service, and so on.
  - eipi10_hn 2y ago
    Yes, we all know that. But the ones that "don't want" to know that are the lawyers and the legal entities. Whatever we scream down here, Mozilla Corporation is the one who will face those legal confrontations, and whatever we agree implicitly here with the softwares won't hold candles to those lawyers and courts without explicit legal wordings.
- joeyh 2y ago
  When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested. If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it. Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? When you enable firefox sync or whatever? Is there any evidence they're backing up stuff behind users' backs? >Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested. The crash reporter has a checkbox that says "Tell Mozilla about the crash so they can fix it". I'm not sure how it can get more clear than that. https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/images/2023-03-02-19-43-28-d8c53f.png https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
- mrayycombi 2y ago
  You may be literally correct, but the purchase of an ad company makes that literal assumption likely wrong. The ambiguous nature of the changes favor some shady self dealing. Sorry.
mzajc 2y ago
As far as I know, Mozilla is funded primarily by Google. From their 2023 financial report[0]: > Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively. Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated. [0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
- zb3 2y ago
  For me, the best option would be to be able to donate to Firefox engineers directly, but not to Mozilla, they do too many things, I don't stand for those, just the Firefox browser...
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    This. I’m starting to wonder if it could be possible to raise some funds and hire people to work on Firefox (and Firefox only). Maybe partner with the FF forks to help raise money? I don’t really know how that would work.
  - gruez 2y ago
    Money is fungible. Every dollar you donate earmarked to "Firefox engineers" can theoretically be offset by the Mozilla foundation/corporation moving one dollar to something else. This eventually breaks down if the sums are large enough, but at the scales that individual donations can muster, it'll probably hold.
    - anonymousiam 2y ago
      Right. Governments have used the same tricks with lotteries and bonds allocated to specific programs. People vote for these revenue generating methods to fund the programs, and the governments can then divert the money that was previously funding the programs into less popular sinkholes.
saghm 2y ago
I think the question here is around how much money is actually needed to develop the browser features that people want without everything else that Mozilla does. At minimum, people would presumably want security fixes, new browser features that get standardized that websites will expect to be able to be used, and probably some amount of support/bugfixes for issues that people run into that aren't vulnerabilities but still might be annoying. It seems like a substantial amount of work, but I don't have a good sense of exactly how much would be needed for that. My understanding is that Mozilla makes its money primarily from deals to make certain search engines enabled by default, and secondarily from donations (with "selling user data" being somewhat of an unknown right now given that they seem to be claiming that they _don't_ make money from it because they're not "selling" it under what most people would consider to be selling, but it's not clear whether that's because they're claiming that "anonymized user data" isn't actually "user data" or whether they're not "selling" it). The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative. [0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-money https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...
999900000999 2y ago
A very tiny percentage of people will switch. No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.
wruza 2y ago
Someone needs to dismantle the system that clings onto a standard that requires $^6+/mo to implement. This is much more realistic than playing chase me game with someone who makes the rules. They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance. Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.
hakfoo 2y ago
I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU. If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team. EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".

by zb3 2y ago

db48x 2y ago

> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival. So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions. For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.

nickthegreek 2y ago
Your statements do not align with the reality of Firefox’s own words. They are trading/selling your data and they updated their ToS to reflect that. “ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar” https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms... This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
- db48x 2y ago
  But that has nothing to do with the new language that was added to the ToS, which states: > You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content. This new license to the data that you enter into the browser is only for local operation of the browser itself, not for ads or sponsored suggestions. In addition to that license, they also use the words that you type into the urlbar or search box to customize the ads and search suggestions that you see. It is important to keep these two things separate, because only one of them is new. The other has been there for years.
  - joeyh 2y ago
    Nothing in the ToU says this is local only or not for ads.
    - db48x 2y ago
      Of course it does. It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage. Just for Firefox to follow your instructions. You type in a url, and it navigates to the url for you and saves it in your history. You type in some form data, and it submits it for you and saves it for later.
      - nickthegreek 2y ago
        > It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage. It does not. That is explicitly stated as a subset of their rights. Before that sentence you might notice: “This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.” So check the privacy notice and you find… “How we use data We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business” So they can use the data in anyway that helps sustain the business.
        alt227 2y ago
        > We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business I would say that those 3 vaguely worded things pretty much cover them to use consumer data in any way they want.
        nickthegreek 2y ago
        Exactly.
        eipi10_hn 2y ago
Dwedit 2y ago
Typing on your own computer, and having the draft stored into local storage requires absolutely no policy at all. If anyone else's computer is involved with that, then it's a problem. Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".
- db48x 2y ago
  I agree with you, but it seems that a lot of lawyers do not. Most of the other browsers have the same language in their ToS, as do many programs like Microsoft Office.
- zb3 2y ago
  Exactly, Mozilla just tries to mislead people that their "web services" are indivisible parts of Firefox, but they're not, for me it's a software running on my computer.
  - db48x 2y ago
    I don’t think that they are trying to mislead at all. At no point do they call Firefox a service. Instead they call Pocket a service, and their VPN a service, and so on.
- eipi10_hn 2y ago
  Yes, we all know that. But the ones that "don't want" to know that are the lawyers and the legal entities. Whatever we scream down here, Mozilla Corporation is the one who will face those legal confrontations, and whatever we agree implicitly here with the softwares won't hold candles to those lawyers and courts without explicit legal wordings.
joeyh 2y ago
When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested. If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it. Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.
- gruez 2y ago
  >When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? When you enable firefox sync or whatever? Is there any evidence they're backing up stuff behind users' backs? >Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested. The crash reporter has a checkbox that says "Tell Mozilla about the crash so they can fix it". I'm not sure how it can get more clear than that. https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/images/2023-03-02-19-43-28-d8c53f.png https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
mrayycombi 2y ago
You may be literally correct, but the purchase of an ad company makes that literal assumption likely wrong. The ambiguous nature of the changes favor some shady self dealing. Sorry.

mzajc 2y ago

As far as I know, Mozilla is funded primarily by Google. From their 2023 financial report[0]: > Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively. Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated. [0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

zb3 2y ago
For me, the best option would be to be able to donate to Firefox engineers directly, but not to Mozilla, they do too many things, I don't stand for those, just the Firefox browser...
- notpushkin 2y ago
  This. I’m starting to wonder if it could be possible to raise some funds and hire people to work on Firefox (and Firefox only). Maybe partner with the FF forks to help raise money? I don’t really know how that would work.
- gruez 2y ago
  Money is fungible. Every dollar you donate earmarked to "Firefox engineers" can theoretically be offset by the Mozilla foundation/corporation moving one dollar to something else. This eventually breaks down if the sums are large enough, but at the scales that individual donations can muster, it'll probably hold.
  - anonymousiam 2y ago
    Right. Governments have used the same tricks with lotteries and bonds allocated to specific programs. People vote for these revenue generating methods to fund the programs, and the governments can then divert the money that was previously funding the programs into less popular sinkholes.

saghm 2y ago

I think the question here is around how much money is actually needed to develop the browser features that people want without everything else that Mozilla does. At minimum, people would presumably want security fixes, new browser features that get standardized that websites will expect to be able to be used, and probably some amount of support/bugfixes for issues that people run into that aren't vulnerabilities but still might be annoying. It seems like a substantial amount of work, but I don't have a good sense of exactly how much would be needed for that. My understanding is that Mozilla makes its money primarily from deals to make certain search engines enabled by default, and secondarily from donations (with "selling user data" being somewhat of an unknown right now given that they seem to be claiming that they _don't_ make money from it because they're not "selling" it under what most people would consider to be selling, but it's not clear whether that's because they're claiming that "anonymized user data" isn't actually "user data" or whether they're not "selling" it). The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative. [0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-money https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...

999900000999 2y ago

A very tiny percentage of people will switch. No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.

wruza 2y ago

Someone needs to dismantle the system that clings onto a standard that requires $^6+/mo to implement. This is much more realistic than playing chase me game with someone who makes the rules. They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance. Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.

hakfoo 2y ago

I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU. If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team. EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".