this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

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(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The update on their news post supports the "don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send" intention.

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.

Whether or not to believe them is up to you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Text removed in Mozilla TOS update:

       {
           "@type": "Question",
           "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?",
           "acceptedAnswer": {
               "@type": "Answer",
               "text": "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. "
           }
       },

here's the diff

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 hours ago

digging around in the the issue linked to that, it seems like the person who closed/approved this is someone from a different, external agency who lists moz as a client (her hachy profile also lists that as her employer)

this pr was closed "because we have new copy"

there's probably some questions to be asked around how this decision/instruction got made, but one would have to wade into moz's corp and discussion systems to do so (and apparently they also have a (people mostly communicating on) Slack problem - nfi if that's open to community joining)

none of them look good tho tbh

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 hours ago

Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn't want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of "not selling your personal data". Looking forward to April when that's finally deprecated.

+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think it's a nonsense nothingburger "clarification", esp. given the defaults firefox sets a priori on a fresh profile. even with the "no, don't turn $x on" choices for things that it does offer those for, there's still some egregious defaults being turned on

the cynic in me says it's intentionally vague because they're trying to, in advance, lay the legal groundwork for whatever the fuck they push on by default. my motivation for that thought is because of seeing the exact playbook being used by other services in the past, and it tracks with the way they've been pushing other features lately

[–] [email protected] 0 points 18 hours ago

Yep, the clarification doesn't really clarify anything. If they're unable to write their terms of service in a way that a layperson in legal matters can understand the intended meaning, that's a problem. And it's impossible for me to know whether their "clarification" is true or not. Sorry, Mozilla, you've made too many bad decisions already in the recent years, I don't simply trust your word anymore. And, why didn't they clarify it in the terms of service text itself?

That they published the ToS like that and nobody vetoed it internally, that's a big problem too. I mean, did they expect people to not be shocked by what it says? Or did they expect nobody would read it?

Anyway, switching to LibreWolf on all machines now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesn't really matter, you get is abuse either way.

How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.