58
votes
Firefox's new Terms of Use grants Mozilla complete data "processing" rights of all user interactions
Link information
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- Title
- Mozilla Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox - OMG! Ubuntu
- Authors
- Joey Sneddon
- Published
- Feb 26 2025
- Word count
- 486 words
People are really jumping to the worst possible interpretation of this.
I think there's some "abused dog syndrome" happening here: in recent years we have become so used to product offerings and privacy guarantees becoming steadily worse that we flinch whenever we think it might be happening again, even when what we're actually reacting to has no ill-intent.
The most likely explanation (and the one that Mozilla implies in their update) is that some lawyer has got twitchy about the fact that Mozilla don't ask for permission, when using user data, to do the thing that the user wants to do with it, i.e. send a web request.
It is 100% novel to assert that things that I do on my computer with software that Mozilla merely authored have anything at all to do with Mozilla legally. Nobody else, even the usual suspects of the tech villains gallery, does or asserts this. I'd be very interested to hear the legal theory that leads to this ToU.
(It makes more sense with services; for example, Tildes needs a license to my comment in order to display it to you. If this comment were "all rights reserved", Tildes would be violating my copyright by serving it to the general public. But Firefox is, of course, not a service.)
I think Mozilla gets a lot of undeserved shit. They're the "can't win" butt monkey of online browser discourse; people complain that their revenue is homogeneous, and then complain when they try to diversify it. They complain about every change to Firefox intended to improve its market share, but also blame Mozilla for Firefox's small market share. Google has pulled a remarkable fast one in getting people to blame Mozilla for struggling to build Firefox when Google is 100% responsible for making "web browser" a category which requires a multi-hundred-million-dollar revenue stream to develop. It drives me nuts, to be honest. But this feels to me like a 100% unforced error. Asserting novel rights, and making nonsensical, novel claims about why they want those rights, comes absolutely out of nowhere, and I cannot see anything resembling a reasonable justification for it.
I think that's a pretty good explanation,
It'd be nice if it wasn't all so implicit though.
With their new blog post explaining the changes, where they say that at least some of the changes are because 'some jurisdictions define “sell” more broadly than most people would usually understand that word', and then proceed to describe one the things falling under those 'broad' definitions being when they 'collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar', which seems to be precisely selling data, it seems like flinching here was rather appropriate?
I don't know how they provide those two features (ads on new tab, sponsored suggestions in search), but I don't agree that selling data is necessarily involved. They've recently put in quite a bit of work on PPA and other differential privacy systems, and so it could be that these are being used.
By the way I totally agree that Mozilla should also not be in the advertisement business, but they need to pay for development somehow and perhaps opt-out, privacy-preserving ads are among the least bad ways to raise revenue.
The offensive portion of the new terms:
I'm very disappointed in Mozilla, and this isn't the first time in recent history.
They've updated their blog post with this note:
lol, this does absolutely nothing to clear anything up.
(I’m laughing at Firefox’s update, not the decision to share it here; thanks for doing so piotr)
I'm confused. Was Firefox unable to function prior to the addition of this license, or has it been operating illegally all these years?
I suspect the answer is probably "neither": some lawyer was worried that they weren't definitely legally clear, and wanted to add some protective language.
"This is probably legal" gives lawyers the same feeling of unease as "my car is probably locked" does for the rest of us.
Am I the only person that intentionally leaves my car unlocked to avoid having smashed windows and stuff taken?
I feel like this depends on where you live. I would never leave my car unlocked because it would be stolen, but I've never had to worry about people breaking in just to steal stuff 🤷♂️
I go the other way around and don't leave stuff in my car. Has worked out pretty well other than the one time the thing that was left in my car was the garage door remote...
There's a lot of people chatting about this on mastodon - here's one fairly popular reply chain.
One valid concern is that a blog post is not a legally binding document, so unless the terms are changed, they can say whatever they want in a blog post without altering what they're actually doing.
It sounds like they're writing as if Mozilla is the legal entity operating Firefox on your PC, rather than you. So the process of typing a URL involves you telling Mozilla, in the person of Firefox, the URL, and then Mozilla sending the URL to the destination server to get the content.
I think this is an absolute nonsense way to parse the situation, but it seems to be becoming popular in the age of "apps" that go on people's devices and then do stuff there that actively harms those people and advantages their developers.
I don't know how to interpret that. Every browser is a "user agent" that acts on your behalf as you navigate the Internet. Why does the company need permission to do it, though?
Is Firefox considered Mozilla's service, or is it more concerning the other services like their VPN, Relay, Pocket, etc.. ?
I am genuinely not sure if I would call a program you can install and that would continue working if the company shut down today, a "service".
Oh I missed that, thanks
That has some... interesting implications.
The ambiguity alone really puts me off anyway.
Not really sure what to do though, probably look for a Firefox fork or another Gecko-based browser
Please post about what you choose when it happens. I'm sick of letting the erosion of content rights and privacy roll over me, and I'd like to do something about it when possible.
For reference, this is the privacy notice they're talking about.
So, after reading that Privacy Notice, AFAICT this omgubuntu article is basically FUD since nothing Firefox is doing seems out of the ordinary or particularly concerning to me. Most of the data processing doesn't leave the local device and is security or basic functionality related, and what isn't is either an opt-in feature (e.g. the new sidebar AI chatbot), has an opt-out (e.g. telemetry), or is something the user chooses to do (e.g. use google as their search, visit and grant permissions to sites that use cookies and/or location data, install and grant data access permissions to add-ons, etc).
Indeed, the privacy notice is less concerning. But the wording of the Terms is awful. I would think Mozilla has enough resources to come up with a more precise statement that meets whatever legal requirement they need to.
Unless, of course, they're planning on using these vague terms to eventually benefit their $30 million AI project.
That's possible, I suppose. But I personally don't think the reason for the new ToS is because they secretly intend to start siphoning up user data for their AI projects. That would be pretty out of character for them, especially considering they actually already do have an AI project they developed themselves built into the browser; Their translation feature. But like pretty much every other feature in the browser, it was built with user privacy in mind as well and doesn't actually transmit any data externally. The translation processing is all done on-device in the browser.
I think the more likely reason for the vague terms is not nefarious, it's just lawyers being typical lawyers and using the broadest terms possible because that reduces potential liability.
That just looks like corporate/legal jargon, that is blown up like if they said "we somehow collect everything you do through Firefox, because Chrome isn't evil enough". That's ridiculous.
My parents grew up under Apartheid, and even being white they and all their friends had their phones bugged for daring to be university students advocating for a better (non-Apartheid) world.
And it was an open secret that some of their fellow students were employed as spies for the government.
So even if this does turn out to be a major nothingburger I don't like anything that erodes or seems to erode privacy.
Privacy is like a fire extinguisher. You need it, but you hope you never need to use it. But if you don't keep it up, it will result in catastrophic losses. It's a stretched analogy but it works.
Mozilla has published new blog post addressing two most common concerns about the ToS:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
I have to disagree. This language is much better.
"As you request" changes the context quite a bit. One could argue something opt-out being "requested" by the user is a bit dubious, but otherwise I think this resolves my concerns.
Mozilla is not operating FIrefox. It's not a service! They do not require any rights for me to run it on my computer.
This is the thing that makes no sense here. They've taken boilerplate "social media service" copyright license terms and applied them to something which is in no way, shape or form a service. The net result is incredibly overbroad and mostly nonsensical.
So just to pick one example: I use Firefox Sync a lot. I send tabs back and forth between various devices, both manually and automatically. This is a service Mozilla operates as part of Firefox. It requires they process data I have input into Firefox and requested they handle, and the lawyers will rightly insist that they need my agreement to do that legally. I could be wrong because IANAL, although I do have some experience of creating EULAs, but that's all this appears to be to me.
There are other internet-based services Mozilla provides as part of Firefox - a password manager, an email obfuscation tool, some VPN-like/sandboxing stuff (not sure if that's still there) and more. You are, of course, welcome to not use of any of these services, but they are still there. Maybe there's a fork with none of those things in, which in theory could have a different EULA (but in practice lawyers are expensive and it's probably not worth Mozilla's resources).
Look at this the other way around, would you rather Mozilla were handling user's data - however ethically and securely they might be doing that - without permission?
Except all of those services are covered by separate Terms of Service, linked separately on their Legal page, so why would the browser's Terms of Use need to cover them as well?
Well, like I said, not a lawyer. But I'm inclined to trust Mozilla when they say this is a non-issue. The wording of the change in question looks very nothingy to me. It smells entirely of asses being covered due to twitchy lawyers but I dunno, maybe the Mozilla foundation are somehow out to get us or whatever it is people are worried is happening. I'm sure someone can dig through the source code and find out if that's going on, that's the nice thing about open source.
You have to also bear in mind I don't have the energy to care very much about any of this stuff. I want my browser to work. I really don't care if Mozilla (or anyone else) were selling my "data" (whatever that even means). Which I don't think is what's happening anyway. They're not complete idiots, they know who their userbase is.
Safari is pretty much it.