I don’t understand how they are supposed to “sell your data” if you just never use a Mozilla account and uncheck all the telemetry. Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source.
It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software.
Well, I never used the sync feature, if I ever need to save urls, I’ll just store it in Standard Notes or something. I also uncheck all the telemetry. I guess I’m unaffected by their ToS change.
If all you’re doing is “unchecking” then there’s more you’re missing:
https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection
The whole advanced configuration settings in
about:configare probably never seen by the majority of users. Ultimately though, you’re right: for the most part, privacy-focussed forks aren’t offering anything that you couldn’t manually configure for yourself in mainline Firefox, assuming you have the time, energy and interest.Certainly, if you’re in the habit of policing all of these relatively undocumented flags with each update to be sure you haven’t been opted in to any telemetry you don’t know about and assuming that all of it remains optional, you’re absolutely unaffected. However, they now have a license to everything you do within Firefox which they state they will only use to “help” you. Does training their AI model to make targeted suggestions to users count as “helping”?
On another note, taking back a promise not to sell users’ data, even if your personal data is protected because you rigorously police the
about:configpage, is not something many people are enthusiastic about. Just because I’m safe, doesn’t mean everybody else is.Hm I see, I have sync to keep my history and bookmarks synced across devices (also helps easily share urls among devices)😅