They changed the phrasing, since in some jurisdictions “sharing anonymized data with partners” can apparently be interpreted as a sale of data, if they get something in return, even if it’s not a fiscal payment.
But after the outrage that sparked, they’ve rephrased the policy again and wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasoning, which is at the very least plausible.
I read about this too, and it worries me. Google has donated over a billion dollars to Mozilla over the years. That alone doesn’t scare me so much as it’s a blatant propaganda tool to deflect the antitrust sentiment that plagues them and will probably some day do its work of breaking them apart.
Fortunately, there are numerous open source forks. I am currently using Librewolf, a fork of firefox focused on privacy and anti-tracking, and it has worked without a hitch. A couple of my extensions have required fiddling with to get right but it’s part of life if you care about these things.
They changed the wording of their policy for legal reasons. They haven’t actually changed what they do. They already updated the text of the policy to clarify.
firefox is going through thier own enshittifcation down the line, they changed ther policy about data recently
They changed the phrasing, since in some jurisdictions “sharing anonymized data with partners” can apparently be interpreted as a sale of data, if they get something in return, even if it’s not a fiscal payment.
But after the outrage that sparked, they’ve rephrased the policy again and wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasoning, which is at the very least plausible.
As I understand it that has more to do with covering their ass. They haven’t changed their practices.
I’ll care when Firefox loses ManifestV2 support.
I read about this too, and it worries me. Google has donated over a billion dollars to Mozilla over the years. That alone doesn’t scare me so much as it’s a blatant propaganda tool to deflect the antitrust sentiment that plagues them and will probably some day do its work of breaking them apart.
Fortunately, there are numerous open source forks. I am currently using Librewolf, a fork of firefox focused on privacy and anti-tracking, and it has worked without a hitch. A couple of my extensions have required fiddling with to get right but it’s part of life if you care about these things.
They changed the wording of their policy for legal reasons. They haven’t actually changed what they do. They already updated the text of the policy to clarify.