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Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 days ago by alyaza to c/technology

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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 An archived version from January 30 says: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.

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[–] comically_cluttered 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I know you only want software from the official repos, but it's really simple to add the LibreWolf repo and use that.

Other than that, there's not really much in the way of Firefox forks in the official repos. I believe the Debian builds have their own configurations as well, but I'm not certain. You could use other browsers (Falkon, GNOME Web, etc.), but they're severely lacking in features.

Off-topic, LibreWolf uses the extrepo package to add their repo which is a great third party repo management program for Debian. It's curated by maintainers of official Debian packages and has selection of other third party repos for some popular software that either doesn't make it into the official repos for whatever reason or aren't kept super updated in Debian Stable.

That and it's so much easier than adding signing keys, messing with sources lists, etc. I wish more software used it, honestly, but the maintainers know what they're doing.