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The Linux Experiment made a video in which he says that he has lost trust in Mozilla and is therefore abandoning Firefox and Thunderbird (or any other Mozilla product).
This is a legitimate take, which I can't argue with. You do you. However, I find that the arguments he made to support his claim are quite misleading. I want to go through them.
Firstly, his criticism of the new Mozilla terms of service - and I quote verbatim - is that:
The vague wording also does mean that Firefox has access to everything that you type inside the browser, and potentially anything you upload through it.
To which my simple answer would be: ...no shit? Firefox has always had "access" to everything that you typed or did in the browser, just like any application has "access" to everything you do using it.
Of course, the key difference is that now Mozilla has a license to that data, not just access. Look, I'm nitpicking, but it's an important distinction. The idea here is that the license is required for Firefox to use data you're submitting, like the URL you want to visit; other browsers do that too, like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. The Word text processor also has that, Safari has a similar wording, and so on.
As the CEO of Epic Software claims, there has likely been an internal legal review of the current Firefox privacy documents, and it turned out that this line should've been there already, but it wasn't, and thus they rushed to add it.
But this does not change what Mozilla can do with your data. Before this, they could access all of your data and share it around according to their Privacy Policy; now, they can still access all of your data and still share it around according to their Privacy Policy. Nothing changed.
He also complains that the Terms of Use can change anytime without your explicit consent, but again, the same applied previously. We did not have "Terms of Use", but the usage of your personal information was contained in the Privacy Notice, which could've changed anytime. And it did, as we've just seen.
What also did not change is the fact that Mozilla has advertisement partnerships for the new tab page and for the search bar; it collects some aggregate information specifically about your interaction with those ads, and that aggregate information is shared with the advertiser. They've been doing that for years: what you saw on-screen is the old Privacy Policy, not the new one.
Again, most likely following the above-mentioned review of the legal documents, it turns out that this practice is technically considered "selling user data" in some jurisdictions. Thus, they had to rush to remove the "we don't sell your data" promise. Now, here Nick says that:
Except, that's also a really weird justification because first you're not supposed to collect any personal information, up to that point: that's why you introduced the terms of service; to have the right to collect and access that data. So, you [previously] wouldn't be affected by any definition of "selling" because you didn't have anything to sell.
This is WRONG. He is saying that now that the terms of use have been introduced and now that they have a license, they're collecting and selling your data, and so they had to remove their "we don't sell your data" promise. That's NOT what happened. They are doing exactly what they were doing for years: collecting and sharing aggregated data about advertisement interaction. The privacy policy already told you that. Here's the same image as above to re-iterate this point.
Simply, they now realized that they can't legally do this and, at the same time, say that they "don't sell your data".
Now begins the sketchy - IMO - part of the video. Nick points out that AI needs data to be trained on, which, fair enough, it does. He also points out that Mozilla is trying to generate revenue by developing privacy-respecting AI. Fair enough, they are.
And, through what becomes very wild speculation, he claims that the Terms of Use are the first step to harvesting all of Firefox users' data to train AI, which is something that does not have any evidence or even hints that this might happen.
Do the new Terms of Service allow for AI training or similar? No, they don't, as they still have to follow their Privacy Policy.
Does the new Privacy Policy allow for AI training? No, it doesn't, as it says that none of your personal data (your page content, files you upload, what you type on pages, and so on) is uploaded anywhere, not even for ads.
Do the new Privacy Policy or Terms of Service make it easier to use your data for AI training later on? Also no. That had always been up to the Privacy Policy, which always could've been changed like that (snaps fingers). If this is a "first step to sell your data", it's a completely unnecessary step that does not get them closer to their goal.
Nick claims that in the future, some kind of AI could be integrated within Firefox itself. He makes the example of Orbit, an extension by Mozilla that implements some AI functionalities like summarizing documents in the browser. He says: one day this might become integrated in the browser, and then they'll use your data for training or something.
This is where it becomes clear just how off-track he is, in my opinion. Let's talk about Orbit for a second: Mozilla tried its best to implement Orbit in the most privacy-respecting way possible. It does not send your data to any of the big AI players out there, but rather it uses a Mozilla-hosted Mistrial instance, which is open weight, does not collect any information about the model input after working with it, and in no way contributes to the training of any model, let alone with your data.
Unless you run a model locally, which isn't always possible, this is as privacy-aware as AI can get. If you don't like it, then you don't have to use it, but some people like this kind of feature, and it's great that Firefox is working on a privacy-aware way of providing them.
He concludes this section by saying:
At that point, their Term of Use will also include transparently without you ever noticing it or accepting it by clicking a button, [...] the fact that they're going to use that data to train an AI model or to make the AI features work which will very likely be just Firefox just selling your browser data maybe anonymized maybe not to AI companies. That's exactly what the plan sounds like to me
Which, again, has no basis whatsoever in reality. If Firefox one day updates their Privacy Notice to say, hey, we now sell your data to train AI… then (a) everybody will freak out, and it certainly wouldn't go unnoticed, and (b) they could've already done that, no need to add these Terms of Use. And this is even assuming that they want to do it, whereas everything Mozilla has done so far is exactly the opposite: they're working on locally-running AI to avoid giving your data to other parties, they worked with AI companies to allow artists to opt out from AI training, and so on.
There's only one - ONE - thing that Firefox is doing and that we don't like: they are collecting interaction data with ads on the search bar and sharing that data with advertisers. They were doing that already, they are doing that now, and you might rightfully dislike that. It might be an opt-out feature, I did not check. But to think that this is all part of a big plan to harvest your data and sell them to AI companies is completely absurd.
Now, I'm using some strong language here, but - if you follow my channel - you know that I have the upmost respect for Nick.
He says that, given Mozilla's past, we should no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. Fair. But here we're gone all the way to a complete assumption of bad faith, assuming the scenario where Mozilla is most evil instead of the most likely one.
As another example, Nick here says that Mozilla is beginning to act like a for-profit. And I think it's important here to remind everyone that the company that develops Firefox is a for-profit. The Mozilla non-profit organization is a different entity, with different organization and working on different things. Sure, the former is a subsidiary of the latter, but they are nonetheless different entities, and the former is still a for-profit company.
I trust the for-profit Firefox company as much as I trust any other for-profit that I rely on: very little. I use an Honor phone, but I don't particularly trust Honor, and I would ditch them instantly if they gave me any reason to. I use a Fujifilm camera, but I don't trust them either, and I'll happily switch to whatever manufacturer - or browser - works best for me. Right now, that browser is Firefox. It might not be for you, and that's fine.
Now, Nick is switching to a fork of Firefox, and he's free to do that – it's a tradeoff, where you get delayed updates in exchange for an additional set of eyes on the code. It's also a bit of a risk, as if everyone switches away from Firefox to a fork, I'm not sure Firefox would be developed anymore, nor do I think that forks would be able to maintain the browser on their own. Still, I'm not questioning that decision; rather, I am (yes, heavily) criticising the reasoning he's giving to more than a hundred thousand people.
His stance feels so strong that he is also ditching Thunderbird. I believe this decision to be somewhat irrational: the company behind Thunderbird is a different one than the one that drafted these Terms of Use, and it's led by different people. They've already said that they will not adopt similar legal language. Thunderbird is an extremely cool and community-driven project, and I would hate for people to associate that with whatever Mozilla is doing for no reason (except, of course, Thunderbird's company being a subsidiary of Mozilla).
I could go into more detail about the new Terms of Use, but I've already done an entire article about them last week. I could also go into more detail about some specific claims, such as the fact that they paid their CEO "too much" money, but I've already done that a few weeks ago.
This leads directly to what might be the most important question of this video: how much did Mozilla pay me for this article? Sadly, their check bounced, and they are ghosting me, so it looks like I won't receive the money they promised me. This puts me in a tough spot since the cost of running this channel - from servers to equipment to contractors - is double the current income, and I'm running on a deficit. If you could support economically the making of these videos, it would mean a lot to me: links are in the video description.
