Last Wednesday, Mozilla updated its terms of service for Firefox. The goal was noble: the foundation wanted to provide more transparency to users and provide more details about its data mining. “We've tried to make this information easy to read and understand — there should be no surprises about our operations or that of our product," wrote the Mozilla blog at the time.
Mozilla accused of asking too much
Bloody hell! Some passages of the terms of use were particularly vague and seemed to give Mozilla a lot of prerogatives over the data of the users of the browser. One sentence was: "When you download or enter information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use this information to help you navigate, experience and interact with online content, as you indicate by your use of Firefox." In other words, everything the user did with the browser was freely available to Mozilla.
Some observers, such as Brendan Eich, co-founder of the Brave browser, reacted strongly, fearing that the language Mozilla was using signaled a commercial pivot for the free browser. The foundation quickly tried to set the record straight; an update on the blog indicated that there had been confusion. “We need a license to allow some basic Firefox features to work properly. Without it, we wouldn't be able to use the information entered in Firefox, for example”, it says.
This license in no way implies that Mozilla appropriates user data, or the right to use it in any way. In fact, the terms of use have been rewritten to specify (and this is important!) that Internet users only grant the rights necessary for Firefox to work, thus excluding any appropriation of the data.
The controversial passage has thus been replaced by a more specific one: "[The rights also include] a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to do what you request with content you enter into Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership rights over that content." In the process, Mozilla also removed a reference to its confusing acceptable use policy and updated update the Privacy FAQ.
0 Comments