AI Summary:
Overview:
- Mozilla is updating its new Terms of Use for Firefox due to criticism over unclear language about user data.
- Original terms seemed to give Mozilla broad ownership of user data, causing concern.
- Updated terms emphasize limited scope of data interaction, stating Mozilla only needs rights necessary to operate Firefox.
- Mozilla acknowledges confusion and aims to clarify their intent to make Firefox work without owning user content.
- Company explains they don’t make blanket claims of “never selling data” due to evolving legal definitions and obligations.
- Mozilla collects and shares some data with partners to keep Firefox commercially viable, but ensures data is anonymized or shared in aggregate.
At this point I care about ownership of what I do on my browser, Chrome under these guidelines is a better alternative (and that’s a low bar)
How is chrome better? It’s literally run by an ad company, and there’s no way they have a better TOS.
It’s not it’s just slightly less bad than Firefox on the perspective of ownership,
E.g.: under the new guidelines by Mozilla you’re not allowed to bookmark pornhub
This is thanks to Mozilla’s focus on “privacy respecting “ advertisement and ai, go to any open source conference and you’ll see a list of ai talks by them.
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Don’t get me wrong I implore anyone to move to any browser that isn’t; Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera
I’m gonna need some evidence for that.
The only thing that’s “worse” about Firefox’s TOS IMO is that it gives them the right to “sell” your data, which seems to mostly apply to their business deals with advertisers (e.g. Google search and Pocket). Google doesn’t need that because they are the advertiser.
With Firefox, you can disable Pocket and change the search engine and you’re probably good. With chrome, you can’t really get away from it, especially since you can’t install an effective ad blocker anymore.
Brave’s TOS are better, but I only use them as a backup because I believe strongly in alternative rendering engines. For that reason I still recommend Firefox, though with an asterisk that they should consider a fork if they don’t want to disable defaults.