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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause.

I believe your confusion stems from a misreading of "as you indicate with your use of Firefox". You're reading it like "by using Firefox, you indicate".

Contemplate the difference between

"The car is allowed to move as you indicate with the controls."

versus

"By using the controls, you indicate the car is allowed to move."

The former explicitly only allows the car to realize your intent, whereas the latter gives the car license to do whatever it pleases.

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You have now edited your comment at least 3 times. I find it hard to take this argument seriously, and indeed struggle to understand how it isn't trolling. At best this language is ambiguous; at worst it is misleading. It certainly ignores the core point of my comment, which is to construct hypothetical actions by Mozilla that would NOT be permitted by the clause. I strongly feel that your purpose in defending Mozilla here would be better served by providing those examples.

> You have now edited your comment at least 3 times.

Yes. I reworked the example a few times. I think the third rewrite made it pretty clear.

> It certainly ignores the core point of my comment, which is to construct hypothetical actions by Mozilla that would NOT be permitted by the clause.

The hypothetical action you gave is not permitted, because the user would not have indicated they wanted Mozilla to do that. Firefox/Mozilla is only allowed to use your data as indicated by you.

Mozilla should consider rewriting their statement for clarity, unless of course the ambiguity is the point.

The statement is clear and simple and would not benefit from a TOS rewrite. What you really want are clearer processing directions built into the Firefox UI, not a longer or different TOS.

Something like, a popup over the execute button on the search bar disclosing the specific processing instruction you are providing by pressing that button, and by whom.

Or, when you use a vertical scroll bar, a confirmation that no processing is occurring outside your local machine.

These things would satisfy some more detail-minded people, but ultimately would provide no significant value to either Mozilla or the marginal user, so it's really no mystery why Firefox does not do this.

I guess. But what they really need is trust, which was their selling point for a decade. But that takes a long time to build up and no UX changes can bring back.

The phrase is "...as you indicate with your use of Firefox"! It is NOT "...as you indicate with your Firefox user preferences." Using Firefox is what indicates your agreement, similar to how using your credit card indicates your agreement with the card terms. I take it back - the meaning is not ambiguous at all.

I'm at a loss as to how to proceed from here, given that we seem to have different ideas of how the English language works.

However there's more that also precludes such use as in your example:

> license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact

Mozilla phoning home your bank account details is not helping you do that in any way, so it is not covered. The next part, that we seem to disagree on, only further narrows that down to actual user intent.

You're not indicating that they can have a license to do anything, you're specifically giving them a "license [..] to help you [..] as you indicate".

Ok, so you read it to say that at some later point they will ask, and that point the language will matter.

What was the purpose of mentioning it now? And why write in such an ambiguous way that it could be interpreted otherwise? And that still doesn’t give me confidence about what they will do at a later time. I don’t like it at all, these are used car dealership tactics.

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