Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put "we won't sell your data" back into the privacy policy? (Have they done so...? I can't tell.) (leminal.space)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by ell1e@leminal.space to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Firefox is trying to gain back user trust with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O-xyNkvIB9g

This is a legit question: Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put "we won't sell your data" back into the privacy policy? I'm actually not sure if they haven't already done so, let me elaborate:

https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Brave: "We do not sell, trade, or transfer your information to any third parties." This seems to obviously be in the legally binding text part. As is this one: "It’s Brave’s policy to not collect personal data1 unless it’s necessary to provide services to our users, or to meet certain legal obligations. We do not buy or sell personal data about consumers." (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.)

However, for Firefox it seems ambiguous to me, which worries me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice There is no appearance of "sell" in the entire privacy document, excpet for the top summary where i'm not sure if it's at all legally non-binding.

Does anybody know if it is legally binding? If Mozilla were serious about it, why would they leave it ambiguous whether it is...?

Based on that, I'm not sure if Mozilla's video about getting users back is worth trusting. I wonder if it's just me.

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[–] Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

For them to sell your data, they need to collect it first. And as of now, all data collection can still be opted out of.

[–] voxel@feddit.uk 8 points 20 hours ago

They collect personal data before you even have the chance to opt out which is a clear violation of the GDPR. They promise to delete it within 30 days when you opt out, but is was collected nonetheless.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 4 points 19 hours ago

I need to manually opt out?

[–] ell1e@leminal.space 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

That's fair, but that requires the trust that they won't add any collection without telling people. And it seems like they kind of want a license for all data I enter into the browser, which again Brave doesn't seem to do. It's like Mozilla is going out of their way to look shady and to harm trust. It's sad. I've been using Firefox for a looong time until I left it behind.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 3 points 20 hours ago

trust that they won’t add any collection without telling people.

It's open source so you can inspect it. If you don't know how to do that you can pay for a 3rd party audit.

Also if it were to be found out, even without being open source via some pack inspection (e.g. using a software that checks if data is being sent to a server, e.g. imagine starting Firefox on a virtual machine then checking if any data goes to e.g. firefox.com) and it were to be published then their entire brand would be dead. So rationally speaking I don't think that's a worthwhile bet.

[–] Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

While I can understand not wanting to trust corporations and Mozilla has definitely become more corporate over the years, if they ever start to collect data without the ability to opt out, by (european) law, they need to inform the user about the data collection. So for now, I don't see much reason to be alarmed.