Yozul

They removed a broadly worded promise that might theoretically be used to get them in trouble for selling anonymized data. I’m not happy about that, but it doesn’t surprise me.

The rest is just people being angry at Mozilla for describing how a modern web browser works, because other companies have pointed at similar language to argue that they have the right to do whatever they want with any information they collect and no one has stopped them. That sucks, but the problem is that there are no consequences for large corporations, not that Mozilla is using the information you put into your browser to access the internet for you. Maybe Mozilla will also decide to intentionally misinterpret their own legalese to train some garbage AI, but the absolute worst case scenario is that they’re the same as every other significant browser, and a more reasonable interpretation would be that the non-profit organization is probably not profit motivated and actually means the things they say.

Who knows. I can’t see the future, but without Firefox forks of it are a dead-end, and any other browser is still going to collect a bunch of information and use it to navigate the web for you, because that’s just how today’s garbage javascript laden websites work. Yelling at Mozilla for explaining that in their ToS isn’t going to fix it, and Ladybird isn’t going to magically change how those websites work. If you really want to do something about it, don’t use those websites. Good luck with that.

Is there anything in the new ToS that’s even bad? Like, there are lots of people breathlessly ranting about how privacy is dead because Mozilla mentioned the existence of third parties and gibberish like that, but when I read it myself it mostly seemed like they were just saying that if you use third party services through Firefox then the third parties will have your data. That seems kinda like a nothingburger of a controversy to me. I dunno, I’m not a lawyer, maybe I missed something, but if so I certainly haven’t seen anybody else explain it properly.

Yes to the first part, no to the second. For some reason people like to pretend that surveillance is a binary on or off thing, but that’s gross oversimplification to the point of being more damaging than an actual lie. All the various government agencies collect whatever easy to find information about you there is to get, but that information is possible for you to have some control over, and it’s too expensive for them to really properly process all of it. It’s just some random bits of trivia about you sitting in a bunch of disconnected databases until somebody takes an interest in you. If they start to take an interest in you, they start coordinating their information and actually targeting you for more individualized information gathering. This is adding gay and trans people to that next level up of surveillance, and that absolutely does change things. Pretending nothing the government does matters and there’s no point in even trying is maybe the most harmful lie you can spread. Please don’t.

They weren’t allowed to surveil you because you’re gay or trans. Now they are.

:3