Given that Mozilla updated their site a couple days ago to remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers" when a flag associated with the new Firefox terms of use is enabled (see https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...), I'm not so sure that this is a CYA about standard web browser usage.
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
{% else %}
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
{% endif %}
> remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers"
You mean wording like this?
""Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love."
> We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data.
and instead there's vague weaseling
> doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“)
I'm not like most people, I am a bit stupid and have a very low threshold for what selling my data is.
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
You can either have 2.5% of users who know why they are using your browser and are willing to make a donation or you can have nothing while we use a fork with your telemetry ripped out.
> We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)
So they are sharing your data with partners, commercially. but only in "anonymized" form so its OK?
What a neat sleight of hand. "We're actually Truly Good, but those annoying lawyers won't let us call ourselves that, so we kind of take that back, but you get the idea right?"
