Privacy

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Mozilla Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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From the new terms:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Mozilla updated their post at the top:

UPDATE: 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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Clarifying literally nothing.

"We couldn't use information typed into Firefox." Good. You don't get that information. My software, on my computer, does. Will some insane new law suggest Notepad spies on users by capturing their keystrokes? No? Then this aggressively vague bullshit is justifying a data-collection scheme. Metadata is still data.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible.

You have that! It's implied by provision when you distribute your software under eg.: GPL!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible

Gee whizz, like what? What "basic" functionality is missing that can only be solved with a ToS saying they're going to track how I use their browser?

Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox

That's what I needed to see. So it's not missing basic functionality, they just want to make it legal to track your browser usage.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's a nice disclaimer. They should clarify that in their privacy policy directly instead of just saying "oh that's not what we meant guys, pinky promise 😉"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

They mean there stupid services such as sync and ai, but the idiots who wrote this should have clarified that this doesn't encompass the browser. They do require your data to provide those afterall.

The way it is worded is just bad they shoudl have specified services that need data like ai in the wording:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, something like:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to provide the following services:

Then list the specific services.

If I don't use any of the services, they have no right to use any of my data.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Seriously Firefox include many services, specifying the TOS for the entire browser is stupid.

What is worse is that people are asking for clarification and there is no response from Mozilla:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, they should have a general one that lays out their intentions, and then addendums for each service. It's hard to tell which are intended to apply strictly to Firefox and which are intended to apply to other things, like AI, Pocket, Sync, etc.

Keep the base one small and tight, and then have specific exceptions for services that require them.