Mozilla, the nonprofit firm behind the Firefox browser, is reassuring customers about using their private knowledge after a controversial change to its FAQ earlier this week.
A phase of the FAQ, titled “Does Firefox promote your private knowledge?”—which assured customers it “by no means has” and “by no means will” supply their knowledge on the market—just lately disappeared. Customers shortly noticed the change, prompting concern on Mozilla’s GitHub and Reddit communities, ArsTechnica notes, with some customers even recommending totally different browsers.
One Firefox consumer writing on X even posted “RIP Firefox” in response to the amendments.
In the meantime, a brand new clause appeared in Firefox’s terms of use. “Whenever you add or enter data via Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to make use of that data that will help you navigate, expertise, and work together with on-line content material as you point out along with your use of Firefox,” it learn.
In response, Mozilla mentioned an try at readability as an alternative “created some confusion and concern.”
“We’d like a license to permit us to make a few of the fundamental performance of Firefox potential,” Mozilla mentioned in a blog post. “With out it, we couldn’t use data typed into Firefox, for instance. It does NOT give us possession of your knowledge or a proper to make use of it for something apart from what’s described within the Privateness Discover.”
Mozilla chalked up the change within the wording of the FAQ to authorized concerns, saying the phrase “promote” has a broad authorized definition in “many jurisdictions.” It additionally clarified that any knowledge it shares with third events “is stripped of doubtless figuring out data.”
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Mozilla has contended with different privateness controversies up to now yr. In September 2024, a nonprofit digital privateness group known as Noyb filed a complaint in opposition to Mozilla over a Firefox characteristic dubbed Privateness-Preserving Attribution (PPA). Mozilla mentioned the characteristic helps Firefox ship knowledge about consumer exercise to advertisers in a approach that preserves privateness, however the group alleged the characteristic violated Europe’s Normal Knowledge Safety Regulation (GDPR).
When you’re nonetheless involved about your knowledge, you’ll be able to head here to discover ways to tweak your privateness settings on Firefox. And in the event you’re contemplating making an attempt out totally different browsers, take a look at PCMag’s comparison of the most popular choices.
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