Comment by pmontra
1 year ago
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information,
Taken literally it means that when I use Firefox to upload a file to a customer's web site Mozilla is getting that file too, which does not seem likely. They could get a copy of the text I'm typing right now in Firefox or it means that the browser could do some local processing on those data. But if the results of that processing would stay local why would they ask the permission? It's not that emacs, vim, grep, sed, awk etc have to ask me the permission to use the information I'm inputting into them. So they are definitely sending information back home or they plan to do it.
The point becomes how to block any calls from Firefox to Mozilla. Note that don't have a Firefox account because I never trusted that the data in transit from them would stay private. I'm not logged in into Google as well. Maybe I have to finally install a Pi Hole and route all my traffic through it. Hopefully Blockada will take care of that for my Android devices.
I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.
So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?
Because the legal system around backpacks are better understood. The more common something is the less legal paperwork there is. Judges understand backpacks and have for hundreds of years. Many judges don't understand technology. As a result when selling a backpack you can rely on the court's understanding and thus not have to account for every possibility. Meanwhile because the court might not understand technology you have to account for every possible trivial thing.
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Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.
The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
My comments above are based on precedence when sites like Facebook added these clauses and people got all panicked thinking the company was going to start selling their content (rather than selling their souls /s). The mundane truth was that they needed the wording to make sure they were legally given the right to publish the content onto the web in the way they did. So people were assuming nefarious reasons when they were just legally protecting themselves.
Now, it does seem strange that Mozilla have suddenly added this when they haven't had it previously. Personally, I deem it highly unlikely that they are planning on monetizing our content in some way; whilst they have made some strange decisions sometimes I don't think they are completely stupid. Mozilla is in a precarious position right now, they are only managing to scape by on user trust and if that disappears they are finished. I'd like to think they are not foolish enough to do something that would catastrophically erode that trust, and selling user data to advertisers would kill them.
Having thought about it a bit more now, I have to wonder if they have dreamt up some other mad scheme, like Mozilla Cloud Storage, or something that would require such wording in the terms. Hopefully, it's just a wording update to protect themselves. I guess we will find out in due course.
[edit: fixed a typo.]
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The question isn't what you (who presumably understands technology) would think. The question is what every court in the world would think.
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> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.
If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".
The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.
Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.
>If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
It's hard to tell from your comment who exactly is the target of your complaint. You're not wrong that this interpretation might be silly, but that's not out of the ordinary in carefully using terms of art to insulate from legal liability.
And the issue of peculiar terms of art is leagues different from the issue that everyone else seems to be raising that it represents an intent to abuse private data. Those are two completely different conversations, but you're talking about them here like they're the same thing.
By such logic, operating systems would need a disclaimer like this, as would keyboards, screens, etc.
> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file
If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.
That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…
They could restrict the language to that specific legal situation, couldn't they?
At this point my trust in Mozilla is so low that I could almost believe they intent to run the text I download and upload through an LLM nanny that can scold or ban me if anything offends its Californian sensibilities.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to [...] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
“Californian”??...
Call it what you like, "San Francisco techy", ""woke"" if you like trendy pejoratives, whatever. I don't care what you want to call it but I won't play along if you intend to say that regional value system is actually uniformly embraced across this country, let alone across the same globe Firefox users are spread across.
In the social sphere Mozilla resides in, voting for a socially conservative political party makes you a fascist which puts you at odds with Mozilla's acceptable use policy if you talk about your politics using Firefox. If Firefox users are supposed to be bound by that document, as judged by Mozilla, that's a problem.
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As the browser runs locally on our machine, surely its possible to just block firefox phoning home by DNS black holes or even hosts file or something?
That's exactly what Firefox originally claimed was a stark difference compared to Chrome: "use us and you can finally be safe and not need to play cat and mouse anymore"
If you’re planning this, just use a fork of Firefox that does those things. Less setup and you don’t need to update that file whenever they change the domains used for telemetry.
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> is easy to block network access (never plug ethernet)
Some TVs secretly include a modem and SIM card, to make sure they get your personal data back to their masters.
Every company in the world is coming after your privacy. How far are you willing to defend it?
> Some TVs secretly include a modem and SIM card, to make sure they get your personal data back to their masters.
That’s a pretty wild accusation to make without naming even a single brand or model…
> Every company in the world is coming after your privacy.
This is clearly true though.
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>Some TVs secretly include a modem and SIM card
Which TVs? This is a major expense for a product with rapidly depreciating costs and intense competition, all to do something illegal/immoral?
I believed this for a time, but now I believe it is an urban legend. Granted a plausible one, and one that might be true in the future... but not true as of yet.
Give us a single make/model that does this.
To test my privacy I us a decoy! I play porn from Hunters laptop in a loop overnight. There are so many reasons it should be reported!
So far no problems.
Really? Which ones?