Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
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The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
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Please let them not ruin Firefox with some bullshit AI. I can’t take much more of this, Firefox is one of the last things I have left.
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Yes, I gathered that from the previous comment, but thank you for the additional info.
I just hope it doesn’t progress further in the future. AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.
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Until the tech bros let an AI manage nuclear weapons because “cost savings”
But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.
And you’re drastically underselling the potential impact of AI. If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.
One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.
Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time
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Ok but it kinda is though
Give an example, a first-person example, where it is not slop.
as a glorified search engine, after pretty much all search indexes were neutered on purpose…but even then it’s…mostly passable, but always untrustworthy.
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Correct 😎
That’s good to know actually.
So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of. The ghost of Mitchell Baker will haunt us forever.
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It says they’re going to collect usage data. Nothing about opting out.
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They use the term telemetry in a special way. If they are collecting info from users, that is telemetry under a different name, ok fine. Not collecting info means they receive 0 bits.
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It says
That says to me they want to know (among other things) how many browser users make zero use of the AI feature. To acquire that info, they have to collect it. You have to assume the worst when you see phrasing like that.
Ah yes, they’re going to collect all those 0’s /s
No, they’re going to collect a “this person used the chatbot sidebar” if that person has telemetry enabled. That’s it.
If something changes or comes to light, then I’ll be worried, but this just seems like normal technical data they use to know what to prioritize.