Exhibit A: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

Exhibit B: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/

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.

I don’t agree to this as written; and I am not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt given Exhibit A. I think an argument could be made that selling my data to advertisers would help me “experience” and “interact” with online content. Perhaps it would be a difficult argument, perhaps not. I think skepticism is warranted.

Firefox has struggled to find a profitable business model outside of Google paying to be the default search engine, and it looks like these changes are a pivot to address this. I don’t think it will be good for users.

I’ve seen this sentiment, but I don’t think it’s credible. I don’t think we should normalize legalese that explicitly enables bullshit; it’s not like it couldn’t be written any other way. It’s written in English, though it has legal intent, and we have words and phrases to clarify such things.