Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxylad | Hacker News Reader

Look at what they are ACTUALLY doing:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

The change removing "Does Firefox sell your personal data? 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." makes it pretty clear that the intention in the changes is NOT just covering their bums for using your input to provide the webpage you wanted. They are positioning to sell your personal data.

That promise to never have, never will sell your personal data was highly valued by many Firefox users and Mozilla must be pretty desperate to break it.Particularly given online privacy is suddenly crucial for many out-groups in the US - and pretty much everyone outside the US. The biggest marketing opportunity for years just landed in Mozilla's lap, and they spilled it.

View on HN

Full context, from the link YOU provided: ""Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love."

There is no reasonable way to read this as an attempt to sell your data. This quote is also reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/

Is there an actual genuine legal threat or something that prompted this change, or is it just some bored lawyer.

That text continues with this:

> We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

So they share data with partners, which helps to make Firefox commercially viable, meaning those partners pay them for that data. Or in other words, Mozilla sells user data. Even when anonymized or aggregated, it's still selling data.

On https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms..., they give an example of an overly broad definition of "selling" from California:

> "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration."

I read that definition, and think to myself... "transferring" ... yeah, a web browser definitely has to transfer data ... "to a third party" ... yeah, web browsers have to send that data to web servers owned by other people. Silly California! That's not selling!

Oh wait, there's more. ... "in exchange for monetary or other valuable consideration". ... oh. Yeah. I would call that selling too. How is that a broad definition? Rather than broad, I would call it comprehensive.

So Mozilla has had to stop saying they are not selling your data because... they are actually selling your data. Or else they have plans to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com