Wow, this week has to be one of the worst for the people over at Mozilla. There has been tremendous backlash to the organization’s updated Terms of Use.
Maybe not has big of a deal to Mozilla’s Mr. Robot blunder or the announcement to drop Firefox’s custom extensions system for that of Chromium, but still.
To recap: Mozilla announced terms of use and an updated privacy notice for Firefox on Wednesday. These were worded in lawyer-speak and included the following sentence:
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.
Tech sites wrote about it and users were up in arms over the wording. Mozilla tried to calm users in an update, stating that the new terms did not give it ownership over user data or the right to use it for anything, even things not mentioned in the privacy notice.
It appears to have helped little. Mozilla published a new statement yesterday saying that it has updated the wording in the new terms of use to make things clearer for users.
The new wording includes the following paragraph now:
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.
Mozilla says it has also removed the “reference to the Acceptable Use Policy” because it seemed “to be causing more confusion than clarity”.
The Privacy FAQ was updated as well to better provide information on terms like “sells” according to the update.
This is a fairly common statement. Google, for example, has a big section of its terms of service dedicated to the worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license that users give it.
If you check the terms of other browsers, you probably encounter something similar.
Was it an overreaction? Even with all the explaining, it seems likely that Mozilla won’t convince everyone that it was.
What is your take on this? Do you use Firefox currently? Let everyone know in the comment section below.
Switch to Floorp, LibreWolf or Mullvad. They are Firefox forks, and they are still way more private. All your extensions, scripts and setting that you had on Firefox should work on those browsers as well.
Another nothingburger; every other browser (or app of any sort, or web service) already has boilerplate in the user “agreement” saying the same, or usually worse. If you think Mozilla is evil, feel free to use something warmer and kinder.
Do you use Firefox currently?
I do, but I am quickly becoming a convert to MS Edge–contant issues with FF speed, memory and CPU usage; site rendering, etc. FF is truly becoming a mess.
I didn’t notice this until last week while setting up a couple of new computers. MS Edge–peppy as all get out! What happened? These were new profiles, not copies from an old install. And all the boxes I had to uncheck. Phew!
@boris , a lot of the reason that LibreWolf or Mullvad’s forks of FF are more secure is because of their settings and limited extensions.
If you want to import all your own settings and use all your own scripts and extensions, you’re missing the point of using these forks. You might was well stick with vanilla FF – which is not a bad choice – configured the way you want it.
That’s why I use Brave as my primary browser. It is pretty safe and has tons of options by Chrome based browsers standard. But if Brave fails, or I need something more secure, I can live with fewer options on Mullvad for 10% of my browsing.
I notice Mozilla has removed the “Active Logins” and “Form & Search History” clearance options in the History menu settings on 135.0.x. I did search for them on my Win 11 machine but nothing shows up. Only reason for doing that is because they’re present on 115.21ESR which is still supported on Win 7/8.1 and I was comparing both at the time.
The reason it sprang to mind is because the Dutch Post Office requires everyone who wants to send a parcel to anywhere in the world to do it and pay for it online. I was doing that to send a parcel to Thailand today and was faced with the fact that the Dutch Post Office online form is a complete mess. They seem to think that just because Dutch addresses comprise of just three lines of text every other country is the same. Thailand however has a minimum seven lines which requires you to try use additional fields which of course don’t line up properly. After spending the best part of an hour trying to get them all in the correct order which was little more than an exercise in futility, I finally gave up and printed my own label placing it alongside the one the Post Office created. Without that I was absolutely certain the parcel wouldn’t arrive since the house number was wrong just to begin with.
Subsequently, I was trying to find the entries in the History menu so that I could clear them. But no, nowhere to be found. I’ll have another go tomorrow bearing in mind that Moz might be copying details like this and I don’t want my stuff floating around out there unnecessarily.