this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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I don't believe that anyone misunderstood the wording.
The problem lies within the broad meaning of the chosen words. If you are angry, you have absolutely every right to be.
Regardless of Mozilla's intent here they have made a rather large mistake in re-wording their Terms. Rather than engaging with a legal team in problematic regions; they took the lazy way out and used overbroad terms to cover their bottom.
Frequently when wording like this changes it causes companies to only be bound by weak verbal promises which oftentimes go out the door whenever an executive change takes place, or an executive feels threatened enough.
Do not be deceived; this is a downgrade of their promise. It is inevitable that the promises will be broken now that there is no fear of a lawsuit. There's nothing left to bind them to their promises.
The Mozilla foundation wasn't ever intended to remain "financially viable"; it was supposed to remain non-profit. They should be "rightsizing" and taking pay cuts instead of slipping a EULA roofie into their terms of use.
All that being said; I'm going to be watching carefully.
I still think they have time to backpedal, make it right, and clarify. I don't permit my installations to talk to their data collection services anyways; via network policies. I have no problem tightening those screws and forcefully disabling their telemetry in other ways as well.
If I have to migrate; well; I already have LibreWolf installed. I might try a few other forks next; to see which ones 'just work' with the web properly to protect my privacy while still allowing all websites to work properly as intended so long as I give that website appropriate permissions as I see fit.
Even with this change, I'm not sure their argument makes sense. What part of the CCPA's definition of "sale of data" precludes them from using it is beyond me. The definition is clear about ending with "...for monetary or other valuable consideration". So what consideration is Mozilla getting for transferring data to web servers?
I understand funding a large project like Firefox is hard. But they also have some of the most hardcore fans tech has seen. Kagi has shown that users are willing to pay (I myself use their $10/mo plan). So why can Mozilla not attempt this? A lot of us donate to Mozilla Foundation--where does that money go? How much goes to Firefox?