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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

In other news: Mozilla basically the only major internet company whose business model isn't built on selling your privacy.

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I love both companies, but you realize Mozilla makes most of their money because of a search deal with Google, right?

But Mozilla actually has leverage over Google to commit to user privacy. If Google doesn't like what they're doing, Bing, Yandex, or any other search engine has the opportunity to be the new search default.

Yeah, but selling your privacy isn't the point of its existence, unlike Google, Facebok, Twitter, etc. That makes it the top performer in the Special Olympics, so to speak.

>Yeah, but selling your privacy isn't the point of its existence, unlike Google

I usually agree with your comments, rayiner, but have to disagree with this one.

Unless there is very strong evidence to the contrary (and neither Mozilla's mission statement nor its non-profit status qualifies as very strong evidence), any organization that depends on an organization that 'sells your privacy' (your words) for over 90% of its income is just as bad-for-your-privacy in the long term as an organization that directly sells your privacy.

When I type my words in the little magic box mozilla sends them to the one company I want to see them -- google. I'm not sure how that's a betrayal of privacy? (unless Mozilla is sending other words to google.

I love Mozilla, but technically they do sell your search history for their funding, based on some opaque bidding process to become the default search provider in Firefox.

No. Having a default search engine is not "selling your search history" and Firefox makes it extremely easy to defeat the Google cookie if that is what you as a user wish to do.

But since their goal isn't to make money...

But most of their money comes from companies that do sell your privacy (ie: google for being the default search engine).

That's like saying you can eat a steak and be a vegetarian because the cow it came from eats grass.

you're not forced to use it, though.

What exactly is the business model?

It's a non-profit run with donations. I don't know how much of the code/other contributions are from the community and how much by Mozilla employees though. I could imagine that the translations - for instance - are mostly done by bilingual hobbyists.

This is totally incorrect. The majority of Mozilla's current funding comes from a deal with Google to make them the default search engine in Firefox. Google pays for this because search traffic is valuable.

Oops. I knew that they get a lot from such deals, but that much? (First Google result said it's 97% of their income).

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