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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need 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 to perform your searches, 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. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]

So, did the internet explode again for no reason?

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...

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That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.

Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.

By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.

It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.

> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that. Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.

Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.

Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.

But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.

It's sort of weird that by that argument Chrome is ok, because Google owns both the search engine and the browser.

GP does not imply, that it would be ok for chrome to send all non-google search-queries to google as well.

> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible

wow, that's scary.

So either a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change

I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.

The question I can’t find answered is why now?

They could have done this on literally any date and your question would apply.

Usually the answer is something really mundane. They did a privacy policy review and realized a couple of their core fewtures break the policy.

Or someone new joined the team who had an interest in their privacy policy and realized it contradicts.

There could be a thousand mundane reasons for why now.

Or it could be that they announced an entirely new leadership team last week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

And their "aquisition" of an adtech company last year, and their rollout of its data collection into the browser: https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-ppa-ad/

And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.

But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.

Not to mention their new "AI" integration which they likely want to expand to include all interactions with the browser.

Yes, if this happened two years ago or next week my question applies.

Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.

And while they were doing this privacy policy review they also just happened to delete their promise not to sell your data?

>Mozilla has just deleted the following: “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”

“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. " https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096

Yeah, could be a mundane reason for that too....

Edit add: My sibling list some other things that just so happened to be going on...

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