Posted on 03/02/2025 8:05:21 PM PST by martin_fierro
As noted a few months ago, Mozilla -- maker of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client -- is facing an 80% revenue drop due to investigations into its “revenue-sharing” deals with Google.
That revenue drop is apparently prompting Mozilla's all-out search for alternate revenue streams. Mozilla's changes last week to the Firefox browser's privacy notice and usage terms indicate that users' privacy may be sold out.
Specifically, Mozilla's new use terms provide:
“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
This changed language, in conjunction with deletion of the following from Mozilla's Firefox FAQ page...
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
... leads to the inescapable conclusion that Firefox users' personal data is now very much up for sale.
Mozilla tried later last week to quell the resulting firestorm, including providing the following "clarification":
"You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content."
This inelegant and heavy-handed legalese strikes me as an attempt to appear to be backtracking, without actually doing that.
Plenty of others are commenting on Mozilla's New Way Forward, and it's not being well received. See for yourself, and consider adopting another browser.
I quit FF years ago. BRAVE is now my browser.................
And thanks for the info about thorium- I won’t bother looking at them further then- sounds like it might be not very secure.
Bookmark
Thx...I have new computer with Ubuntu that came with Firefox. Have not even been online yet, so I will disable those first.
I quit using Firefox many years ago as it became a memory hog and was never fixed.
Don’t know if that is still the case now, as I didn’t even know anyone still used it.
Thank you.
“Let’s not even get started on the TV.”
Your smart TV is tracking you, and sending your viewing habits back home? To LG, Samsung, google, Amazon, whoever?
In Amerika, Television Watches You!
Re: Claws-Mail limits
Yes, we have several email accounts on a total of 3 Dovecot logical servers (at 3 different IP ports on the local server machine) and each Claws-Mail instance also has several accounts. Basically, you can have as many as you want (and have disk space for).
“I hate IMAP, and don’t allow the people who have email accounts on my server to use it either. I suppose it has value to government entities, and for businesses that are legally required to keep such records, but to me, it is like buying gold and then letting the seller store it for you.”
That’s why I run our Dovecot IMAP server on our own *local* machine. None of our mail *stays* on our Postfix server at our rented virtual machine for more than a minute or so. It is transferred immediately to our local Dovecot and removed from the non-local Postfix machine. Thus there is no record of the mail contents there. (We don’t run the Postfix locally because we’d need a static IPv4 address, on fiber, with port 25 etc. unblocked, and that would get expensive, or maybe even impossible.)
So, do you “hate IMAP” because mail would be stored non-locally (in the traditional setup), analogous to “having the seller store the gold”? If so, you might consider our approach. It not only provides easier access, it also allows other important files to be backed up from a single, multi-purpose server which is *local* and, in our case, runs Samba for general file serving.
yes but you can change it.
Thanks, but POP works fine for my purposes.
Thoughts on Opera?
thanks for the info- I’ve gotta switch from thunderbird- i htink-
Ditto. He launched the Brave browser which I’ve used since beta. Best browser I’ve ever used.
I use Protonmail now.
It comes with its own email import (and calendar.. and file/folder backup).. all encrypted.
I never even have to log in to my old gmail accounts anymore (thankfully).
Yup, same here.. Brave browser (with chromium, just in case).
"Way try ungoogled-chromium again.
Google hooks removed."
I’ll have to look it up - I have way too much crap tied to my Gmail and it would be nice to wean off it...
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