Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:

Does Firefox sell your personal data?

Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”

The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:

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. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.

  • @[email protected]
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    115 hours ago

    It is concerning - because Firefox barely has enough users to sustain it.

    If no one takes on the development of Gecko, we’re in the soup. It’s the only alternative to blink and WebKit. Tor relies on it .

    • @[email protected]
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      45 hours ago

      It is concerning - because Firefox barely has enough users to sustain it.

      Er… if you think Mozilla is sustained by its users then I have some bad news for you. Or am I misunderstanding you?

      • @[email protected]
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        44 hours ago

        Mozilla is funded by google to promote the search . But how much longer are they gonna pay if no one uses it ?