Technology

You cant go back on never have never will without breaking the law. We need to get these ai tech bros out of these companies if we want them to remain good.

also

Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, "You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content."

Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for "Boston") and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user. You can remove this functionality at any time by turning off Sponsored Suggestions—more information on how to do this is available in the relevant Firefox Support page.

So, turn off Sponsored Suggestions and you're (probably) good to go.

Made the switch to Fennec and IceRaven on Android, and Zen on my Linux desktop, which also has Windows and Mac versions. Sure, they're forks of Firefox, but they are not subject to the same TOS. I used to use LibreWolf on my desktop but ended up having too many issues with it. Lots of crashing and instablility that regular Firefox just didn't have.

Another great tool for unGoogled Android users is FFUpdater. It will handle updating of many open source (not just Firefox-based) browsers. You could also use something like Obtanium for something less browser-specific.

The ToU is in Mozilla's Bedrock repo, but I don't quite know what that repo does. I'm curious if Firefox forks would still be subject to it.

Never have, never will.

So, here's the funny thing about "never will". It's not a promise you can go back on. "Never will" means "forever won't".

Changing that language is a breech of trust. Getting all "nuanced" and weasel-wordy about it doesn't change that.

Folks should start looking into whether the previous promise is legally binding in any way, and start preparing for a class action suit if it is. Because Mozilla's better dead than it is as zombie smoke screen for this horse shit.

What do you think of duckduckgo's browser? It's about page seems to be on par.

What's the best alternative in* apt now?

Some obvious jurisdictions that come to mind, are US vs. EU:

• US: protects "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII)
• EU: protects "Personal Information" (PI)

The color of your hair... is PI in the EU, it isn't PII in the US since it's not enough to pinpoint you as a single person.

Under US law, a data broker can gather a bunch of "not-PII, just PI", and refine it into profiles that can end up pinpointing single individuals.

Under EU law, that's illegal; no selling PI, period.

We will collect data about you and sell it, but only after we've run it through a privacy preserving machine that turns it into privacy jam so you can't tell how much of yours is in the jar.

Fuck's sake, might as well be a warrant canary.

And they're peddling the myth of anonymous data. Great.

Are any of those independent browser projects functional yet?

Konqueror, which is Webkit, is still actively developed, though less feature-rich than more popular browsers.

So .... what is the leading alternative browser then?

One of the reasons Firefox became so popular was that it was an alternative.

Now that they're drifting towards something we don't like ... what is the new alternative?

So since their actions can be considered "sale of data", they are breaking their promise which stated that they will never do that. Got it!

You know, at least it's not Brave, throwing in cryptomining bs, getting caught selling data without telling anyone, or using the profits to push COVID conspiracy theories and anti-LGBT activism, or getting their funding directly from Founders Fund (Peter Thiel).

From the Mozilla forums.

I'm curious what "Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example" means. Like, is that literally just the search I type into the browser bar, or are they talking about scraping data from my browser to improve my searches the way a lot of phone apps do?

I could see some government somewhere passing a data security bill of some kind that makes rules around collecting and using data that redefines what that means in a way that includes something Firefox is already doing. I could also see them using this as a sneaky foot in the door as they plan to ramp up data profiteering like so many companies already have.

It would be nice if they'd clarify their reasoning for doing this a bit more specifically.

/checks for dolphins flying out of the oceans

I tend to trust Mozilla (more than other browser-owning companies), but they really should just clarify exactly what they do that would be considered as sale of data in any jurisdictions.

They seem to be implying that the data is just metadata that has been abstracted for (presumably ad-targeting) commercial purposes, and there are jurisdictions that consider derived metadata as still being "user data", but in that case just make a blog post laying out what and where you are sharing. If your "partners" are opposed to people knowing about them, or you are scared that people would not like who you're in bed with, that is a problem.

Maybe they should replace it with Google's former pledge "Don't be evil": it's free for the taking, nobody's using it at the moment.

Please panic. There's Librewolf. A deshittified Firefox fork. Would be great to support that project.