Mozilla has just deleted the following:
“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. "
Source: Lundke journal.
I’m kind of worried about the knee jerk reactions from people that haven’t read the full communications from Mozilla or looked into their approaches to anonymise data (which they’ve done for years as part of analyzing new feature tests).
Building an application as complex as Firefox requires full-time developers. It’s similar in scale to the Linux Kernel.
To keep building a competitive browser and continue to challenge there ubiquity of Chromium, Firefox needs to exist. Mozilla need to figure out how to make money (their previous attempts at additional services like VPN etc didn’t have much impact). If Google pull the rug from under them regarding their payments to be the default search engine, Mozilla could swiftly fall under.
Advertising, done in a privacy preserving way which they’ve an awful lot of experience at doing, in the near term gives them additional revenue streams to keep the ship afloat.
If we lose Firefox, Google owns the internet. We need to keep talking with Mozilla, not abandon them.
That’s fair, but I think not totally right.
I think Firefox is a great browser, which is why I’m using forks, not ditching it entirely. I still use Mozilla services, and I will continue to keep tabs on and support the development of the browser. However, I will not sacrifice the little privacy I can scrape up by agreeing to terms of use that gather my data, even if anonymized, for use in serving me ads, regardless of whether I think the company behind these practices needs to exist or not—and in this case, I do think Mozilla, and Firefox as a project, must remain strong if we want a free internet for all.
This implicit trust you seem to have in Mozilla, however, is not something I share. First, AI integration, then it’s the terms of use, then it’s the language around data privacy… Google used to say “Don’t Be Evil.” I don’t believe Mozilla will stay good because it’s Mozilla and it’s been good. I don’t like the recent steps they’ve been taking, and so I’ll stop using Firefox; that’s as far as it goes.
Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I don’t want to compromise on this.