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The Forced Firefox Terms of Use (ToS) Clickwrap Agreement is Here
(www.quippd.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Technology
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My feeling on this is basically with Mozilla potentially running advertising campaigns on their own in Firefox (especially with Google funding possibly drying up), Mozilla felt that they needed to clarify their permission for access to user data.
Still, that doesn't really explain why their initial terms were so over-broad in the first place -- that is why everyone's thinking went straight to AI as soon as they made their initial announcement. They haven't deigned to provide us with an explanation for that - besides telling us that it was due to the CCPA.
Clearly we can't lay all the blame on CCPA, since the rights grant is more limited today than at first introduction - a fact that they readily admit.
The post sounds like it the initial terms weren't thought to be broader than the current ones, but that that apparently wasn't clear when they were read by regular people. As a non-lawyer, it seems entirely possible to me that the legal ramifications of both versions are the same, as often things that will read one way to me, turn out to actually mean more specific things in a legal context.
Well - I don't know about them being the same.
The new terms specifically disclaims Mozilla's ownership of your data:
which limits their license to your data to processing it for usage within Firefox or Mozilla services. That is a huge difference. I don't see how they would be able to claim - in a clickwrap agreement - that Mozilla saying that they don't own your data somehow grants Mozilla ownership of your data.
That would be mind boggling.
So what I think -but again, not a lawyer- is that the previous version also didn't grant Mozilla ownership of your data. For example, maybe there was already a legal limit to what rights the ToS can transfer to Mozilla, and the new version just re-iterates the existing law?