Firefox is trying to gain back user trust with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O-xyNkvIB9g

This is a legit question: Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put “we won’t sell your data” back into the privacy policy? I’m actually not sure if they haven’t already done so, let me elaborate:

https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Brave: “We do not sell, trade, or transfer your information to any third parties.” This seems to obviously be in the legally binding text part. As is this one: “It’s Brave’s policy to not collect personal data1 unless it’s necessary to provide services to our users, or to meet certain legal obligations. We do not buy or sell personal data about consumers.” (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer.)

However, for Firefox it seems ambiguous to me, which worries me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice There is no appearance of “sell” in the entire privacy document, excpet for the top summary where i’m not sure if it’s at all legally non-binding.

Does anybody know if it is legally binding? If Mozilla were serious about it, why would they leave it ambiguous whether it is…?

Based on that, I’m not sure if Mozilla’s video about getting users back is worth trusting. I wonder if it’s just me.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
    31·
    3 hours ago

    The reasoning for Firefox changing their policy is that legally, in some jurisdictions, a sale of data is very ambiguous.

    They are sending a “count of active users” to advertisers, which their legal team thinks counts as a sale of private data.

    Is this good enough a reason? Up to you really. Their policy is fairly wide open for further actual data sales now, it certainly gives me an itchy feeling.

    • ell1e@leminal.spaceOPEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      So why can Brave still have that clause? That’s what I don’t get. I also feel like Mozilla could try to do something like “we don’t ever sell your data, except this one corner case” and just explain it, but it seems like they didn’t even bother. (I could be completely misunderstanding things and perhaps I’m being unfair here. It’s just how it comes across to me as an uninformed doofus.)

      • CameronDev@programming.dev
        9·
        1 hour ago

        You’d have to ask Braves lawyers. It could just be that Mozilla is more risk averse, perhaps brave thinks they won’t be sued.

        It would be nice if they were clearer, but I think they don’t want to (or legally cant) define exactly what they do.