Mozilla is sooo fucked here. On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away.

OTOH: if the currently pending court case on anti-monopoly bars google from making payments to mozilla (which is about ~90%++ of their revenue), mozilla truly, and well is fucked. Meaning -they need to diversify, and they know it; they can't sell browsers, related services are heavily competed for, so ads & selling user data is broadly the only viable strat that can underwrite their existence.

Of course, the community won't have it. And therein lies the rub: by going with google's bribe, on this long term, they wrote themselves into a corner they can't exit.