Why? Mozilla has been circling the drain for a while with their poor decisions, and questionable privacy practices all while proclaiming to be all about user privacy. Now they have flushed any goodwill they had right down the toilet.
As leaders, they need to be held accountable for their poor decisions. Which means they need to fuck off, and let new people come in and rebuild trust.
yes, this was a big screw-up all things considered, but crucifying people for a (relatively straightforward, imo) comms issue just seems...borderline violent?
> For instance, Mozilla said it may have removed blanket claims that it never sells user data because the legal definition of “sale of data” is now “broad and evolving,” Mozilla’s blog post stated.
> The company pointed to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as an example of why the language was changed, noting that the CCPA defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
mind you, I sincerely doubt this ever even came across the desks of leadership—if it's legalese compliance bullshit, why would it?
You read it as a comms issue. I don't. I read it they have been selling a form of my data.
In one, my argument is an overreaction. In the other it is reasonable, given they have been misleading consumers. A strategy which clearly would be oversighted by senior management.
in my case i've been using firefox for more than 20 years, through the crashes, the memory leaks, the incompatible sites... and i disengaged, (uninstalled and deleted my account). i am not particularly gung-ho on privacy, all and all a pretty run-of-the-mill middle of the road guy. i wouldn't be surprised if they lost a high 1-digit or low 2-digit percentage of their user base with that debacle...
with the drop in image i fear they lost a lot of potential new users too... that might be the hardest hit. this might accelerate their slow descent into irrelevancy...
it sounds like you and I have completely different understandings of the world, so I'm genuinely not sure I can convince you otherwise, but let me give it a shot
to oversimplify into a couple points:
* people make mistakes, especially in communication—it happens! I misspeak (or often don't fully consider how people with different POVs will interpret what I say differently) all the time, personally
* nearly mozilla's entire remaining userbase has stuck around because of mozilla's independence and focus on privacy. everyone with a brain knows full well that selling all user data entered into the browser is the single biggest possible violation of that. therefore, how would mozilla continue to exist as a company in any capacity if that were actually the case? they would have zero users
finally, I'll leave you with hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I'm not saying they're selling all data put into the browser, I'm saying they're selling user data, and they were doing so when they were claiming they never sold user data. They (charitably) seem to have convinced themselves that what they were doing was not 'selling' (in a similar way to google 'not selling your data' because they don't just make it available wholesale, they only sell the processed results indirectly through their ad business), but California's new privacy laws makes it obvious they should be calling it 'selling'. They've obvious cocked up the communication of this fact, partly with an overly broad update to their ToS, but even with this walking back they should apologise for misinforming people on this page before.
