this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by s38b35M5@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:

The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.

Now it just says:

The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.

In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.

A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.

Now it simply reads:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

Again, a pledge to not sell people's data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They make money from targeted advertising

It is hard to misunderstand that

[–] duhhhh9@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 hours ago

They have many gains from the data they shared. This also includes witnessed data by internal employees to even discover what had to be trimmed down or censored before public release. And then some of those employees moved to other companies and copied the strategy into something profitable. Their ethos was not appropriately measurable and auditable to the degree necessary going forward; it needed to be axed. It's like Google saying do no evil; the sands of time revealed these points unsustainable and limiting to even achieve their objectives in a vacuum. Funding is a security issue. Easy privacy is nice, but the industry needs a lot of work and people have to eat while we test the risky innovations that will make the future shine. Mozilla is still providing great steps to ensure someone somewhere can still make achievable best practices available for all, and when they fail we'll be there to clean up the mess.