OK, so I won’t try to defend Mozilla on the changes, I’m just basically keeping an eye open for what would make me run away and trying to understand the changes correctly. This whole debacle falls into the category of lost in translation I believe, the translation between legalese and actual English, or alternatively they are preparing for an anti-user move.

What I’ve been wondering about is that it might be “not so strange” from a legal point to ask for such rights, uncommon maybe but not out of the ordinary, specially if they use the data for analysis and what not. Removing the part of not selling your data is the biggest red flag in my opinion. But many people seem to put emphasis on the rights of user content.

My non-expert understanding of how it is written is as follows:

Nonexclusive: meaning they are not keeping you from going to someone else and giving them similar rights. This doesn’t mean they can give the rights to someone else, just that you are not blocked with them.

Royalty free: data can be used with no payment needed.

Worldwide: so location of Mozilla or user is irrelevant (no clue if local laws can affect this)

Neither of those terms is inherently bad… As far as I know. But the best part is “to fulfill users requests”, which as far as I can guess if they wanted to use the data in ways the user would be against or simply is not requesting would mean they are breaking their own TOU. All of that put together makes this change seemingly harmless in my opinion… Again, until you get to the point of removing “we won’t sell your data”.

Don’t pay any attention to that kinda stupid comment. Anyone posting that kind of misinformation about AI is either trolling or incapable of understanding how generative AI works.

You are right it is a victimless crime (for the creation of content). I could create porn with minions without using real minion porn to put the randomnest example I could think of. There’s the whole defamation thing of publishing content without someone’s permission but that I feel is a discussion irrelevant of AI (we could already create nasty images of someone before AI, AI just makes it easier). But using such content for personal use… It is victimless. I have a hard time thinking against it. Would availability of AI created content with unethical themes allow people to get that out of their system without creating victims? Would that make the far riskier and horrible business of creating illegal content with real unwilful people disappear? Or at the very least much more uncommon? Or would make people more willing to consume thw content creating a feelibg of fake safety towards content previously illegal? There’s a lot of implications that we should really be thinking about and how it would affect society, for better or worse…

I didn’t expand on the topic, but the fact that you only have privacy if your car is old doesn’t mean the solution is to buy and maintain old cars. Old cars contaminate more and your car is close to be 30 years old. Its a lose-lose situation for consumers. As usual the solution is not to hide or prohibit new tech. Having cameras in the car is extremely valuable, now we just need to regulate it to ensure the consumer is protected from over-reach.

Yeah, same here… I’m cautiously worried, but more for other things that have happened than these last changes.

Ideally, but bitwarden is a great in between solution, you can always export everything later to your self hosted solution of choice.

I’m not going to watch the video so my comment is based on the title (why everything needs to be a video nowadays, just give me an article to read or at least a summary together with the video…)

Yeah no fucking shit… And Tesla is not even the worse out there (and not for a lack of trying), if you consider the analysis done by the Mozilla foundation of the privacy policies of a bunch of major car companies. You dont even have to be the owner of the car, if you ride in one as a passenger you are giving permission for the use of your data in the most crazy absurd ways.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/

There’s just no company to be trusted. Unless your car is very old, you dont have privacy.

Yeah, absolutely, I think these changes done for Firefox are not “that” common, but they are not unheard of either. I have been trying to remember what was it the news that made me think of this kind of terms of use before, some other service doing very similar changes with similar intent. But I just can’t remember it…

With all of this I dont intend to imply that we have nothing to worry and we can trust in Mozilla without second thought. Each of their actions need to be consider as their own and it wouldn’t be the first time they have some misstep. With that out of the way, this particular situation is not the red flag or big issue that many might immediately think it is.

As for the reasons as to why this is happening right now, I have a couple of guesses. One is AI, and the usage of user data for their training and so on, Mozilla is just trying to clarify in legalese what they are allowed to do with our data when we use their software, likely looking towards the future to protect themselves in case it’s needed. The other guess I have for this kind of change is the current situation with IP owners and intermediaries. In essence I am talking of how ISPs and VPNs are under attack for the use of their services by their users.

But anyway, like I said I’m no expert in legalese, this whole topic seems “OK” to me, but we’ll need to keep our eyes open for any future misconduct or overreach by Mozilla with these new terms.

Oh yeah, absolutely, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have that reaction. And especially related to Mozilla, for two reasons, how important I think it is in the future of the internet and how much at risk it is from any entity that would like to have control over that and break the progress of Mozilla.

I’m not an expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but here’s what I feel has been more and more the case… It’s interesting that the examples you set are all hardware communicating with other hardware. That is a key point because any company selling you those devices can easily defend themselves legally if you decide to sue them for using your data just by saying “how else would we get the device working? It is fundamental to read your data to make the device do what is advertised for” and the case would be dropped faster than my dog comes when I open his food. Now imagine the keyboard company is caught sending the key strokes to their servers… Without a good terms of use contract they would lose immediately against legal action. And even a terms of use contract might be considered null if it is proven to be abusive or something.

When it comes to a software company things get a lot blurrier. It’s harder to define the needs for some actions and how things could work vs how they work. So I think it’s not uncommon to have this kind of clauses in such cases, specially for getting user data for maintenance and so on. It was less common in the past but as there are more practical cases and experience of where the law draws lines and limits this kind of additions and edits of user contracts are becoming pretty normal.

Great analysis you did there of the terms of use and the privacy notice! Just as soon as I read the title of the post I knew people would have a knee-jerk reaction to it. We can blame them for not actually going to read exactly what it is about, but I can’t blame them for the pessimistic point of view, although it seems to be very prevalent around Lemmy where you are supposed to hate everything and everyone that does something against their opinion. I wish people would try to put more attention into not being manipulated on their opinions by every sentence they read, specially when it aligns with their beliefs.

Again, thank you for putting the effort of sharing your opinion and checking the ToU.