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Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data.
(github.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Firefox
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Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.
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I’m kind of worried about the knee jerk reactions from people that haven’t read the full communications from Mozilla or looked into their approaches to anonymise data (which they’ve done for years as part of analyzing new feature tests).
Building an application as complex as Firefox requires full-time developers. It’s similar in scale to the Linux Kernel.
To keep building a competitive browser and continue to challenge there ubiquity of Chromium, Firefox needs to exist. Mozilla need to figure out how to make money (their previous attempts at additional services like VPN etc didn’t have much impact). If Google pull the rug from under them regarding their payments to be the default search engine, Mozilla could swiftly fall under.
Advertising, done in a privacy preserving way which they’ve an awful lot of experience at doing, in the near term gives them additional revenue streams to keep the ship afloat.
If we lose Firefox, Google owns the internet. We need to keep talking with Mozilla, not abandon them.
That's fair, but I think not totally right.
I think Firefox is a great browser, which is why I'm using forks, not ditching it entirely. I still use Mozilla services, and I will continue to keep tabs on and support the development of the browser. However, I will not sacrifice the little privacy I can scrape up by agreeing to terms of use that gather my data, even if anonymized, for use in serving me ads, regardless of whether I think the company behind these practices needs to exist or not---and in this case, I do think Mozilla, and Firefox as a project, must remain strong if we want a free internet for all.
This implicit trust you seem to have in Mozilla, however, is not something I share. First, AI integration, then it's the terms of use, then it's the language around data privacy... Google used to say "Don't Be Evil." I don't believe Mozilla will stay good because it's Mozilla and it's been good. I don't like the recent steps they've been taking, and so I'll stop using Firefox; that's as far as it goes.
Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I don't want to compromise on this.
You use(d) FF without an adblocker?
Of course not, but it's the principle of the thing. I don't want my data to be in anyone's hand, if I can help it, but certainly not used for ads, regardless of whether I can actually see the ads or not.
I don’t think you’re being unreasonable and in truth I share your concerns. Forks are doing a good job at refining the experience but should the Firefox project collapse, I doubt any fork can meaningfully continue the development needed for such a huge and complex project without the full-time and experienced development team who have been working on the project for an incredibly long time.
I wish Mozilla could figure out a more powerful way to generate revenue that doesn’t require advertising in any form.
I wonder if a yearly fundraising drive like Wikipedia could help. They generated $250Mil+ last time they did.
Yeah, that's probably right, unfortunately.
I doubt it would hurt, at least! They do get some money, <$20M... Which isn't close to being enough, of course, but it does prove there's at least some interest in supporting Mozilla financially, on the users' side.
We need Mozilla corp to be better and there is currently no good way of forcing that to happen.