Thanks everyone for your active participation here. We knew this would have a lot of interest and so we’ve waited to dive into the conversation because we see some themes emerging that I’ll respond to broadly here. The main concerns I’m noting are around the license agreements we declare, our use of data for AI, and our Acceptable Use Policy. Below are a few clarifications to each of these areas.
That’s not what I said. But making a policy explicit rather than implicit seems to me like a good move for privacy. Isn’t it better to know exactly what Firefox is doing with what you type, rather than just assuming?
If they make it more exact such that it’s not ambiguous whether they can use our data for whatever, that would be fine.
I agree, and so does Mozilla. From the linked blog post:
Here’s the Privacy Notice referenced above. While I agree with you that they are vague about their “Partners, service providers, suppliers and contractors” they supply data to (read: Google) they do provide ways for you to request that data.
Does Notepad need a license to interpret your keystrokes and save them to a file? Interpreting my keystrokes and formatting them as an HTTP request to the search engine should not require any online service, and if the data does not leave my machine, it doesn’t need a license nor privacy policy. They have done just fine without a license for decades, because it would be absurd to require a license for fully local operations.
Oh look at that, a privacy policy in Notepad that tells you how Microsoft uses the data you type into Notepad.
It doesn’t. The policy covers what happens after that. Sure, open up Firefox and type whatever you want in the address bar and you can be as private as you want. The second you press Enter is when Firefox does stuff with what you typed, and Mozilla is saying that when you push Enter you give them permission to do that stuff. You’re giving Mozilla permission to send your search to Google for midget porn, or to post your pro-Trump rant to Facebook, or email your great-Grandma’s secret oatmeal raisin cookie recipe to your ex-wife.
It’s turning an implicit use of a web browser (“Of course we’re sending your search to Google and nowhere else wink”) into an explicit use (“When you provide data to Firefox, we’re gonna do this with it, cool?”)
Except the terms don’t promise that. The terms don’t really say anything at all about what Mozilla (the corporation) or Firefox (the software) won’t do with data I enter into Firefox. They do however say that I grant Mozilla a license to use data that I enter into Firefox for several purposes, which means Firefox could reasonably send the search request I intended for Google to Mozilla as well.