TECH NEWS – Mozilla is now trying to get out of its own mess, but it may be too late…

Last Wednesday, Mozilla published a terms of use document for Firefox. It was a first for the open source web browser. There’s a section in there that essentially gives Mozilla permission to use our data, because they get a non-exclusive, royalty-free, international license to do whatever they want with the content we put into Firefox. They also took out a section of the Q&A that promised never to sell user data.

This was not well received by users, and Mozilla tried to reassure users in a blog post: “We’ve seen some confusion about the language around licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to enable some of the basic functionality of Firefox. Without it, for example, we couldn’t use the information you enter into Firefox. It does NOT give us ownership of your information or the right to use it for anything other than what is described in the privacy policy,” Firefox wrote.

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The privacy policy is explicitly detailed, but even that may not regain the trust of Firefox users, as trust takes a long time to build but can be lost in an instant. Many on Reddit have criticized Mozilla’s waffling. One says that people are not upset because they are not transparent, they just want to use a browser that does not collect and sell user data. That non-exclusive, royalty-free, international license sounds like a pretty good AI feature. For AI to work properly, it needs a lot of training data, and that data has to come from somewhere.

Since Firefox is open source, it’s not surprising that some people will start using alternative browsers (Librewolf, for example.) If Mozilla literally breaks its earlier promises, it’s not a coincidence that users may move away from Firefox.

Source: PCGamer, Mozilla, Archive.org