The Mozilla Foundation's new terms of use for the Firefox browser (Firefox), which took effect on February 25, 2025, caused huge controversy and caused widespread criticism of the Mozilla Foundation from the open source community. After the initial response, the Mozilla Foundation failed to address the concerns of the open source community, so now the Mozilla Foundation has revised the terms of use and revised the wording.
The original terms of use that caused controversy were:
When you upload or enter information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you browse, experience and interact with online content as indicated by your use of Firefox.
The wording of the newly revised Terms of Use has been updated to read:
You grant Mozilla the rights necessary to run Firefox. This includes processing your data as described in our Firefox Privacy Certificate. It also includes a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to process the content you enter in Firefox at your request. This does not give Mozilla any rights over that content.ownership.
The Mozilla Foundation said it is listening to community concerns about parts of the terms of use, particularly regarding licensing. Our intention is simply to make it as clear as possible how we get Firefox to work, but doing so also brings with it some confusion and concern.
The foundation also defended its decision to remove “we will never sell your data” from its original terms of use.The legal definition of "selling data" is broad and evolving in some places, and the varying interpretations of "no sale" requirements do leave many businesses unsure of their specific obligations and whether they are considered "selling data."
But the Mozilla Foundation also admitted:We collect and share some data with partners in many places to make Firefox commercially viable. The specific use of this data is explained in the privacy statement, and we are also working hard to strip potentially identifiable information from the data or share it in aggregate form.
The data shared by partners here currently mainly refers to the advertisements attached to the Firefox new tab page, such as website navigation and other services, which may involve the collection and use of user data.
Going back to the licensing issue in the terms of use, for terms of use that contain a lot of legal terms, one word may mean different meanings. For example, in the newly revised terms, "This does not give Mozilla any ownership rights to the content."
The emphasis here is on ownership rather than right of use. As mentioned above, content entered and uploaded by users through Firefox will still grant Mozilla a non-exclusive royalty-free license, which means that Mozilla can use the content without the user's consent.
This is related to some of the data usage in the privacy statement. For example, when you enter a keyword in the address bar, the keyword will be sent to the search engine for keyword association, but it is not clear whether there are other commercial uses.
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