Comment by koakuma-chan

1 year ago

How is "to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content" different from "to do anything we want with it"?

29 comments

koakuma-chan

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jcranmer  1 year ago

My guess is the first phrase is lawyer-brain for "we send the words you typed in the search bar to the search engine for you."

(Yes, they need your express permission to do that, because copyright law is really fucking dumb and makes absolutely no sense if you're approaching it from engineer-brain.)

janalsncm  1 year ago

> navigate, experience, and interact with online content

I can do all of those things just fine without Mozilla also experiencing my online content.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF  1 year ago

My browser sent a request that starts with “POST” in order to tell this website to create this comment but it includes the words that I wrote and therefore “own” as far as copyright is concerned. Mozilla requests a license to send such data to websites in similar contexts as, in this case, I “indicate” by clicking the “reply” button.

Other uses of that data are not licensed. For example, using that data in an unrelated request they send to themselves, not indicated by clicking reply, is not licensed.

  • plaguuuuuu  1 year ago

    Mozilla isn't sending that data. You're sending that data.

    These terms are common on webapps because, well, they're webapps. You send your data to the webapp and they store it on their own servers.

    Web apps, operated by individuals or organisations, are very different to local apps which are operated by you. Just because the Firefox app is running on your device doesn't mean that Mozilla is operating it.

    By granting Mozilla the right to access and use your data, you're agreeing to give them data which they never had previously - instead of just sending the POST to xyz.com you're now sending it to Mozilla as well who can do whatever they like with it, sell it to ad networks, whatever.

  • koakuma-chan  1 year ago

    This is nonsense. Does curl need a license to send HTTP requests for me?

    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF  1 year ago

      > Does curl need a license to send HTTP requests for me?

      No, but if they had one and it was phrased like this one, the license itself would be limited to these activities. If you want something to decry from Mozilla's terms, pay attention to this part:

      > Every once in a while, Mozilla may decide to update these Terms. We will post the updated Terms online. We will take your continued use of Firefox as acceptance of such changes. We will post an effective date at the top of this page to make it clear when we made our most recent update.

      Note that they even tell you that you can check for yourself to see if/when they tell you that you've agreed to give them a new license. That is much closer to allowing them to do anything they want than what the current license allows.

      Regardless of any of that, the thing to have in mind is that this is an explicit message from Mozilla that you are agreeing to these terms by using firefox and continuing to agree to the terms by using firefox. Not to say this is ideal; just that it's as good a time as any to move on from Mozilla and firefox, especially if one is unhappy with these terms. I say this as someone who has left behind Mozilla and firefox after using it for over a decade. I will continue to be on the look out for and supportive of alternatives. So far librewolf (https://librewolf.net/) has been an easy pick-up as it's primarily just firefox with telemetry turned off.