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.
Yeah, its definitely wide open for abuse now. But the California law also seems way too vague as well. What about DNS lookup? That takes a users input and transfers it to someone else, is that a “sale”? Can hardly start separating that out of the browser? Http requests? Its all users initiated, but is it a “sale” in California? Not a lawyer, haven’t a clue.
DNS is fine as the exchange has to be for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration” to be considered a sale. The issue seems to be that Mozilla were profiting off of things like adverts placed on the new tab page, and possibly from the translation service too.
I’m not a lawyer, but “other valuable consideration” seems very broad. For DNS, getting the returned IP address is valuable. Ditto for http, getting the returned webpage is valuable?
I only suggested the translation thing because it (imo) fell under a “transfer of data for value provided”, which makes it a sale?
Getting an IP address or the HTTP payload is valuable to the user, not to Mozilla, so there’s no sale there. Likewise with translation data, but if the translation company then send Mozilla a kickback for sending users their way, it would become a sale. Adverts on the ‘new page’ tab would definately be a sale.
I think they’ve removed the clauses about not selling your data from the ToS for the reasons they’ve stated, but it leaves a wide open hole in their promises and a huge temptation to add more advertising/data-mining in the future. I would have prefered them to instead leave the browser ToS as it was and move the questionable aspects into optional extensions that were licenced separately.