Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.

This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.

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.

Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.

  • ArchRecord
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    104 hours ago

    It’s two things:

    1. Sidebar you can open from the hamburger menu that is basically just a tiny chat UI
    2. Right click to paste the selected text into the sidebar

    If you don’t want it, they don’t seem to be pushing it any further than that. Just don’t click the option in the menus and you’ll be fine. (I believe you can also fully disable the option from appearing in settings too)

    • @[email protected]
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      03 hours ago

      Yes, I gathered that from the previous comment, but thank you for the additional info.

      I just hope it doesn’t progress further in the future. AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.

      • ArchRecord
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        53 hours ago

        AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.

        I wouldn’t go that far. A technology that wastes a lot of energy and creates a lot of bad quality content isn’t the same as a bomb that directly kills millions.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 minutes ago

          But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.

          And you’re drastically underselling the potential impact of AI. If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.

          One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.

          Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time