Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Open source browser maker ties itself up in legalese and explanations

Mozilla this week asked Firefox users to abide by new Terms of Use, and updated its Privacy Notice as well as an FAQ – only to quickly issue a clarification that it isn’t actually claiming ownership of user data.

Mind you, the language of the Terms of Use document initially suggested as much:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

But Mozilla subsequently removed those terms, and insisted it was just necessary boilerplate.

“On Wednesday we shared that we’re introducing a new Terms of Use (TOU) and Privacy Notice for Firefox,” said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product, on Friday in an update to the open source browser maker's initial announcement of the new terms.

Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work

“Since then, we’ve been listening to some of our community’s concerns with parts of the TOU, specifically about licensing. Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern.”

Varma said its contractual language has been updated in an effort to assuage concerns. For one thing, it now states "this does not give Mozilla any ownership" of the data you put into Firefox to use it.

While much of the confusion can be written off as an unforced error in communication – legalese is often misunderstood – the developer's privacy commitment has changed, in its wording at least. The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:

The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.

Now it just says:

The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.

In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.

A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.

Now it simply reads:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

Again, a pledge to not sell people's data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.

“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,” he said. “We changed our language because some jurisdictions define ‘sell’ more broadly than most people would usually understand that word.”

Though the TOU – and its connected privacy policy and acceptable use rules – are written in clear, plain English, are short and readable, and in our opinion contain no huge surprises, Mozilla's earlier choice of wording sparked a backlash on its own forums, as well as on Reddit and other places.

Following that outcry, Varma's announcement on Wednesday about the new fine print was updated to include this disclaimer:

We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

One might argue the new terms are the result of a December management shakeup. That month it was announced three executives were joining Mozilla, including Varma, the author of the above announcements, as a Firefox veep after previously looking after WhatsApp for Meta, and before that, Gmail, and its related tools for Google. The other two were Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, senior veep of Firefox, who previously held top roles at Wayfair, Better, and Roofstock; and Girish Rao, SVP of infrastructure, who was previously at Warner Bros Discovery, EA, Cisco, and Equinix.

Then in early February, Mozilla gained Peter Rojas as a senior veep of new products; he has an interesting history spanning from co-founding Engadget to holding senior roles at Meta and AOL to investing in AI model warehouse Hugging Face and others.

These high-level appointments were announced by Laura Chambers, who hopped aboard as CEO a year ago; the hiring came the month after deep staffing cuts at the Mozilla Foundation – the non-profit that oversees the Mozilla Corporation that develops Firefox and other things.

Competition

Sadly, it looks like the assessment of Moz by former Netscape coder Jamie Zawinski was not far off the mark. He also links to his own earlier criticisms, none of which we can really fault.

This seems like a good time to remind readers that there are other browsers out there based on the Firefox codebase, including our own go-to Waterfox, as well as the tiling Zen browser which has now reached beta.

Others that happen not to press our buttons quite so much, but may appeal more to you, include the security-centric LibreWolf and the customization-heavy Floorp. Other projects showing less recent activity are Pulse and Mercury. Still in active development, but based on older versions of the Firefox codebase, are PaleMoon and Basilisk.

Most venerable of all is the continuing fork of the original all-in-one Netscape suite, Seamonkey. We're sad to note that its release engineer William Andrew Gianopoulos died in January.

Whether or not one agrees with the outrage over the TOU changes, the fact remains that Mozilla is now in the advertising business. Use that information as you wish. ®