Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information,

Taken literally it means that when I use Firefox to upload a file to a customer's web site Mozilla is getting that file too, which does not seem likely. They could get a copy of the text I'm typing right now in Firefox or it means that the browser could do some local processing on those data. But if the results of that processing would stay local why would they ask the permission? It's not that emacs, vim, grep, sed, awk etc have to ask me the permission to use the information I'm inputting into them. So they are definitely sending information back home or they plan to do it.

The point becomes how to block any calls from Firefox to Mozilla. Note that don't have a Firefox account because I never trusted that the data in transit from them would stay private. I'm not logged in into Google as well. Maybe I have to finally install a Pi Hole and route all my traffic through it. Hopefully Blockada will take care of that for my Android devices.

I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.

Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.

The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.

The question isn't what you (who presumably understands technology) would think. The question is what every court in the world would think.

But the more important question then is: what else will the courts think this language allows? Probably Mozilla could argue they need to store those uploads and analyze them under those conditions.

My comments above are based on precedence when sites like Facebook added these clauses and people got all panicked thinking the company was going to start selling their content (rather than selling their souls /s). The mundane truth was that they needed the wording to make sure they were legally given the right to publish the content onto the web in the way they did. So people were assuming nefarious reasons when they were just legally protecting themselves.

Now, it does seem strange that Mozilla have suddenly added this when they haven't had it previously. Personally, I deem it highly unlikely that they are planning on monetizing our content in some way; whilst they have made some strange decisions sometimes I don't think they are completely stupid. Mozilla is in a precarious position right now, they are only managing to scape by on user trust and if that disappears they are finished. I'd like to think they are not foolish enough to do something that would catastrophically erode that trust, and selling user data to advertisers would kill them.

Having thought about it a bit more now, I have to wonder if they have dreamt up some other mad scheme, like Mozilla Cloud Storage, or something that would require such wording in the terms. Hopefully, it's just a wording update to protect themselves. I guess we will find out in due course.

[edit: fixed a typo.]

I think it's likely they're planning to more deeply integrate some sort of cloud services, perhaps with a paid tier. I don't want that either; stuff like that is fine as an optional extra, but problematic when joined at the hip to a browser.

I mean, Facebook did this so they could run research studies and AI on the data, not so they could publish it. You can give yourself the rights to publish something online for the purpose of running the service and give others the right to view it for personal use without giving yourself a full copyright license to do whatever you want with it.

By such logic, operating systems would need a disclaimer like this, as would keyboards, screens, etc.

> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.

If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.

The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".

The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.

Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.

>If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.

It's hard to tell from your comment who exactly is the target of your complaint. You're not wrong that this interpretation might be silly, but that's not out of the ordinary in carefully using terms of art to insulate from legal liability.

And the issue of peculiar terms of art is leagues different from the issue that everyone else seems to be raising that it represents an intent to abuse private data. Those are two completely different conversations, but you're talking about them here like they're the same thing.

They could restrict the language to that specific legal situation, couldn't they?

So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?

Because the legal system around backpacks are better understood. The more common something is the less legal paperwork there is. Judges understand backpacks and have for hundreds of years. Many judges don't understand technology. As a result when selling a backpack you can rely on the court's understanding and thus not have to account for every possibility. Meanwhile because the court might not understand technology you have to account for every possible trivial thing.

for example - app that downloaded entered urls, something even simpler than a browser, hit with copyright takedown in 2023: https://torrentfreak.com/google-bans-downloader-app-tv-outfi...

I don't think a TOS would have helped you with Google's shoot first, ask questions later takedown policy.

Pretty sure this isn’t a legal thing, this is Google going “we got a takedown notice from this company and aren’t about to read it or hear your opinion, in order to protect ourselves legally”

> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file

If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.

That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…

At this point my trust in Mozilla is so low that I could almost believe they intent to run the text I download and upload through an LLM nanny that can scold or ban me if anything offends its Californian sensibilities.

> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.

> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to [...] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/

“Californian”??...

Call it what you like, "San Francisco techy", ""woke"" if you like trendy pejoratives, whatever. I don't care what you want to call it but I won't play along if you intend to say that regional value system is actually uniformly embraced across this country, let alone across the same globe Firefox users are spread across.

In the social sphere Mozilla resides in, voting for a socially conservative political party makes you a fascist which puts you at odds with Mozilla's acceptable use policy if you talk about your politics using Firefox. If Firefox users are supposed to be bound by that document, as judged by Mozilla, that's a problem.

Not everything in the world is about political party your circle disagrees with. Given trends I'm sure Firefox will do something stupid like you're afraid of in short order. But this isnt that, so until then you should save your manufactured culture war fear mongering.

sigh, I feel bad for you... and us Californian techys... this us vs them toxicity is so demoralizing

Not everything is, but Mozilla specifically has been more loud in its support of various political causes most of the world has no interest in than in developing a good web browser for about a decade now, so GP's reaction seems quite appropriate in this case.

Then you’d call Mozilla overly political, not “Californian”

There are many styles of being political, different value systems and approaches to pursuing those values. Mozilla's flavor of political can reasonably be called "Californian". That's not even derogatory so there is no reason for you to act bent out of shape about it. I could have called them woke libtard cryptofacists.

In your estimation, could Brandon Eich explain and defend his political beliefs using Firefox and/or a Mozilla service without running afoul of Mozilla's acceptable use policy, as judged by Mozilla?

I think they would say his beliefs "Threaten, harass, or violate the privacy rights of others".

Any ideological purity test for the use of Firefox is unacceptable. They can have that for their online services if they like, but having such restrictions on the use of Firefox itself is a violation of the essential freedoms of free software.

I think you misunderstood my point. Was that intentional? My assertion was the issue under discussion isn't a political one, and there's no reason to think there is^1. Thus injecting the political issue you're upset about is unreasonable and encourages us vs them fighting; instead of us being on the same side here and resisting Mozilla's attempt to sell user data to AI companies. Because that's all this is about, they want permission to sell your Firefox data to "Big AI".

^1: I do think that you desperately want believe this is about how Firefox is coming after your beliefs, and while maybe they have, or maybe they might. This isn't the step before that, which makes your comment a weird distraction.

> Not everything in the world is about political party your circle disagrees with.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240511204242/https://blog.mozil...

As the browser runs locally on our machine, surely its possible to just block firefox phoning home by DNS black holes or even hosts file or something?

That's exactly what Firefox originally claimed was a stark difference compared to Chrome: "use us and you can finally be safe and not need to play cat and mouse anymore"

If you’re planning this, just use a fork of Firefox that does those things. Less setup and you don’t need to update that file whenever they change the domains used for telemetry.

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