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Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put "we won't sell your data" back into the privacy policy? (Have they done so...? I can't tell.) (leminal.space)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Firefox is trying to gain back user trust with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O-xyNkvIB9g

This is a legit question: Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put "we won't sell your data" back into the privacy policy? I'm actually not sure if they haven't already done so, let me elaborate:

https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Brave: "We do not sell, trade, or transfer your information to any third parties." This seems to obviously be in the legally binding text part. As is this one: "It’s Brave’s policy to not collect personal data1 unless it’s necessary to provide services to our users, or to meet certain legal obligations. We do not buy or sell personal data about consumers." (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.)

However, for Firefox it seems ambiguous to me, which worries me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice There is no appearance of "sell" in the entire privacy document, excpet for the top summary where i'm not sure if it's at all legally non-binding.

Does anybody know if it is legally binding? If Mozilla were serious about it, why would they leave it ambiguous whether it is...?

Based on that, I'm not sure if Mozilla's video about getting users back is worth trusting. I wonder if it's just me.

Update for clarification: I'm not using Brave myself, and this isn't a suggestion anybody should blindly do so.

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[–] 32 points 8 months ago (12 children)

Trust is hard to gain, very easy to lose. And much harder to regain, once its lost.

I have been a Firefox user since... its Mosaic days. And even after Chrome became a thing, FF remained my default choice. It was just my browser, I would shrug at anyone telling me Chrome was so much better.

Alas, their recent switch in regards to data/ads and after that their focus on AI, after a few previous decisions of them that quite worried me too, convinced me to do what I had never imagined I would do: replace FF as my default browser.

I now use Waterfox, and if Firefox is still installed on my Linux box I have not used it since (I'm a liar: I clicked it once, out of habit). I just don't feel comfortable using it, it's not my browser anymore. It's just a browser, like Chrome or Edge, some corp is trying to force feed me, and to screw me with. Thx, but no.

I would love to see FF change path and regain my trust. But this will take some efforts.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I still remember the Mozilla Internet Application Suite before the browser part was spun off into Firefox and the email into Thunderbird. Some of their moves have been disappointing but I'll still never use Chrome

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I remember that too.

    BTW, Waterfox is a fork of FF ;)

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The advice I've always read is to avoid forks because they usually get security updates slower than the main browser. Is that true of waterfox?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    It might or might not be true, but I'm not sure it's particularly helpful advice. It's too wide-sweeping. Literally everything is a fork, apart from Firefox and Safari. Maybe Chrome, since they hard-forked and now go their separate ways from WebKit. But still, that's only 3 browsers. And unless you think that Firefox needs to be avoided because of its privacy violations but somehow are ok with Google Chrome, "avoid forks" doesn't work as an option.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Same boat. Used Mozilla since back when you had to futz to get it to compile.

    Fuck Mozilla. Fuck FireFox.

    LibreWolf fixed what the Foundation and Board enahittified.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I feel more sadness than anger. Like I feel a lot more sad realizing younger people will probably not be able to experiment a free and truly personal web, like the elders among us did. That corporate-free Web used to be the norm... with its clumsiness and its many quirks, its ability to tolerate conflicting opinions too. Now, everything is policed and so... neutered. It's also ad-saturated. It has turned into a TV, just worse.

    Seeing Mozilla take that pitiful road made we feel a lot more sadness than anger, really. They were one of the few that were supposed to stand for another model. But I was not that surprised either...

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Single reason it's my main browser still are addon functionality.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Interesting, it's also not a chapter in https://browser.engineering/

    That being said I imagine Google messed up the whole landscape with its Manifest V3 situation.

    Also I imagine after a certain expertise threshold, one can relatively easily re-create an addon themselves. I'm thinking people who are familiar with Tridactyl or GreaseMonkey might not be as sensitive as this problematic.

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