Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic

Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”

Mozilla also took heat from users after a Mozilla employee solicited feedback in a connect.mozilla.org discussion forum. “This isn’t a question of messaging or clarifying,” one person wrote. “You cannot ask your users to give you these broad rights to their data. This agreement, as currently written, is not acceptable.”

Mozilla announced the new terms of use and an updated privacy policy in a blog post on Wednesday. After seeing criticism, Mozilla added a clarification that said the company needs “a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.”

One of the uses described in the privacy notice has to do with users’ location data. Mozilla says it takes steps to anonymize the data and that users can turn the functionality off entirely:

Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for “Boston”) and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user. You can remove this functionality at any time by turning off Sponsored Suggestions—more information on how to do this is available in the relevant Firefox Support page.

Some users were not convinced by Mozilla’s statements about needing a license to use data to provide basic functionality. “That’s a load of crap and you know it. ‘Basic functionality’ is to download and render webpages,” one person wrote in response to Mozilla’s request for feedback.