On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
Sure, but the license is limited to uses that “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
Not sure how ads would help with that.
AI? Sure, if an AI solution did those things. But it wouldn’t be them training on your data. This would be them using your data in AI-powered services, whether that be search (especially relevant if Google is mandated to stop paying them to default to Google); automatic categorization of your web browsing to make Containers more streamlined and effective; or even just having a completely opt-in AI assistant chatbot that can access data entered elsewhere in Firefox once you activate it.
Worst case I suspect whatever they add will be things you can simply turn off in settings. Ideally it would be opt-in, of course, or at least prompted-opt-out and disabled until first use.
And there are plenty of things that aren’t ad or AI-related that this could apply to. Heck, this could be part of a step to consolidate licenses for other products - VPN, Pocket, email anonymizers, etc. - and to enable deeper integration of those into Firefox.
All of what you said could be true, but every worst case scenario also now has a clear runway.
They will start pushing ads and say it’s helping us by steering us to our interests. Nothing with be opt in, because it never is, and any amount of AI is too much. I also think there is a 0% chance that if they implement something AI, they won’t be training models off our collected data.
I envy your optimism, but until literally any of these major companies steps up and actually buck the enshitification trend, I can’t out any faith that any of them will. Firefox is just the lastest to fall in line.