On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
From the article, what appears directly after the colon…
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.
The whole article is worth reading, especially the part where Microsoft says it doesn’t own your content. Seems they’re aware of Safe Harbor laws.
This is a nothingburger. It is, exactly, the type of boilerplate license wording used whenever a user sends anything to someone’s service. The linked article is to a non-lawyer saying that it’s weird that Mozilla doesn’t explicitly point out that they don’t own your content.
Duh. It’s a license. It never means they own your content. This is crystal clear if you understand legalese.
Might this still mean that they will serve ads in the future or make AI personas out of you? Sure. It might also mean that they’re going to make lawn mowers.
I’ve been following this story for the last couple of days, and I disagree. For one thing, most users don’t consider a web browser’s job to be “sending anything to someone’s service”; it’s local software that runs on your machine. There’s no reason for somebody else to gain a license to the things you create on your own computer just because you created it inside a specific piece of software, but these Firefox terms are written extremely broadly, such that Mozilla would have a license to use this post I’m writing right now if I happened to type it into Firefox (for reference, I did not).
Besides which, there is additional context here like the many changes made in this pull request (16018). This PR removes a whole bunch of language saying that Mozilla doesn’t sell your data, implying that they’re either about to start selling the data you put in via Firefox, or at the very least that they’re open to it. Here’s all the parts that were removed by the above-linked PR:
Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data.
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.
The Firefox browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Is Firefox free? Yep! The Firefox browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
All of this taken together can really only mean that Firefox wants to sell the data you enter into your personal web browser running on your computer.
For one thing, most users don’t consider a web browser’s job to be “sending anything to someone’s service”
What happens when you type something in the address bar? The days where that just told the browser to go to a URL are long gone.
Certainly, but there’s a couple of problems with that line of thinking.
Firstly, “When you upload or input information through Firefox” is far more broad than covering the specific things you type into the address bar. That language covers pretty everything you can possibly do in a web browser. Every link you click, every social media post, every file upload is information input through Firefox. Certainly, you can argue that Firefox is being exceedingly broad just in case they expand the types of information they collect about you, but the terms as written now already give them license to everything.
Returning to the address bar, browsers traditionally send what you type into the address bar to a search engine, not to the author of the web browser (obviously discounting the situation where those are the same people, e.g. Microsoft with Edge & Bing and Alphabet with Chrome & Google). Mozilla doesn’t offer a search engine or any sort of live search facility. The things you type into the address bar are (optionally) sent to the search provider of your choosing, whether that’s Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Dogpile. What good reason is there for Mozilla to receive that information?
Legalese is always written broadly. As with absolutely everything that touches on IP the ones that yell the loudest are the ones that understand the subject the least.
browsers traditionally send what you type into the address bar to a search engine, not to the author of the web browser
The search bar doesn’t say that will happen, so what legal right does the makers of Firefox have to suddenly send what you type there to some other third party service? You know, that “input information through Firefox”.
That’s what the license covers. You giving them that right. You don’t need to agree with this, but that’s how it’s done - legally.
You’re talking about a specific service which they don’t name. They are talking about the generic usage of Firefox which is concerning since they bought an ad company and want to do AI.
Sure, but the license is limited to uses that “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
Not sure how ads would help with that.
AI? Sure, if an AI solution did those things. But it wouldn’t be them training on your data. This would be them using your data in AI-powered services, whether that be search (especially relevant if Google is mandated to stop paying them to default to Google); automatic categorization of your web browsing to make Containers more streamlined and effective; or even just having a completely opt-in AI assistant chatbot that can access data entered elsewhere in Firefox once you activate it.
Worst case I suspect whatever they add will be things you can simply turn off in settings. Ideally it would be opt-in, of course, or at least prompted-opt-out and disabled until first use.
And there are plenty of things that aren’t ad or AI-related that this could apply to. Heck, this could be part of a step to consolidate licenses for other products - VPN, Pocket, email anonymizers, etc. - and to enable deeper integration of those into Firefox.
All of what you said could be true, but every worst case scenario also now has a clear runway.
They will start pushing ads and say it’s helping us by steering us to our interests. Nothing with be opt in, because it never is, and any amount of AI is too much. I also think there is a 0% chance that if they implement something AI, they won’t be training models off our collected data.
I envy your optimism, but until literally any of these major companies steps up and actually buck the enshitification trend, I can’t out any faith that any of them will. Firefox is just the lastest to fall in line.
I refuse to have an involved conversation about this. Mozilla is out of line here and we all know it.
I don’t know what the fuck the top muckety-mucks think is going to happen, but they’re complete idiots either way.
