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.

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

Yeah, there’s an important missing clause in that second part, and sadly that’s the most recent version from the Mozilla Privacy FAQ.  They once promised not to sell your personal data.  Now they don’t.

They claim this is to “better address legal minutia around terms like ‘sells’.”  What does that mean?  They go on to explain:

The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Seems like if you don’t sell/rent/release/disclose/disseminate/etc. user’s data, you have nothing to worry about.  Mozilla says the change is because the term “selling data” is “broad and evolving”.  It really isn’t.

So does Mozilla sell/rent/etc. your data?  Yes.

In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.

In other words, they’re selling your data.

In their privacy policy they list various rights you have, but opting out of this is not one of them.  Actually, it’s rather confusing.  For example, you have the right to “In some cases, restrict or object to how we use your personal data”.  But these cases are unclear.  Also:

But this is telling websites not to share, not what your browsers shares with them.  And of course, you may not live in any of these jurisdictions.

Users are pretty hot about this.  On Mozilla Connect, some comments:

• “And this underscores everything we need to know about their intent… The fact they will come on here and lie about intentions also tells me everything about what I need to without an abrupt about face from Mozilla.”
• “No. This doesn’t even pass the smell test.”
• “You’re going to spy on us, monitor us, harvest our browsing information in violation of our privacy.”
• “The ToU clearly states what you just said it didn’t.  Either you’re reading comprehension level is of toddler age, or you are lying. “

Some of that is a knee-jerk reaction, but there are quite a few comments requesting that these clarifications be made in the binding legal document, not on a blog post.  Which does seem rather to the point.

Seems like making “Firefox commercially viable” has grown in importance while zealously guarding user privacy – the one differentiator Mozilla had – has faded.