With Google Going Bye-Bye, Mozilla’s Evidently Found a New Money Stream… Selling Your Data

Mozilla is evidently selling your data down river, while continuing to brag about how much it’s protecting your privacy.

You’ve probably heard by now that unless Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai hits paydirt with his sucking up to Trump and convinces the Orange One to intervene on Google’s behalf, there’s a good chance the feds are going to put the kibosh on Goog’s practice of paying a bounty to browsers that aren’t Chrome, in order to keep them keeping Google as their default search engine.

Over the years, Mozilla has made gazillions of bucks on Firefox this way — with a browser that for the longest time has only been used by three out of a hundred users worldwide. Mozilla’s not the only one benefiting from this practice, of course. In 2022, it became big news that Google paid Apple $20 billion to be Safari’s default for a year. Poor Firefox isn’t getting that kind of bucks, and the money numbers for Firefox will continue to drop as Firefox’s market share drops, but Bloomberg reported that in 2023, Firefox was still pocketing something like $500 million in payments from Alphabet each year.

When the Train Quits Running to Firefox Station

The trouble is, not only is that amount getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes by, it’s also likely to soon go “Poof!” That’s because of the relatively recent federal court ruling that said Google has gotten too big for it’s britches — meaning its a monopoly — and one of the ways the court is considering remedying that is by requiring Google to divest itself of Chrome, and to quit paying to be the search engine for every browser on earth.

Not to worry. That doesn’t mean Mozilla’s going to starve to death… at least not right away. It seems that over the years, when it wasn’t paying Mitchell Baker multiple millions yearly to do a lotta nothing as the organization’s CEO, it was being a little on the frugal side, and in 2023 according to Bloomberg, was sitting on a nest egg of $1 billion.

It also evidently has a backup plan to keep the bucks flowing — one that’s evidently already up and running.

So what is this plan that Mozilla (an organization that can’t post a blog without telling you that it, and only it, really cares about protecting your privacy) has hatched and is now nurturing?

Well, they’re trying to hide it, but from where I sit it appears that while they’re busy protecting your privacy, they’re also selling it.

I can hear you gasp, like you just heard the news about Shoeless Joe.

“Say it isn’t so!” you scream.

To which I reply, “I know, right?”

Moz’s End User License Agreement

I’ll betcha don’t know that Firefox has a EULA. Neither did anyone else until they let the cat out of the bag on February 26 when Ajit Varma, a VP and Head of Product Management at Firefox, posted a blog about it. To keep it on the down-low, they’re not calling it a EULA, but are referencing it as their “Terms of Use.”

Considering that Mozilla has been around since back in the days when there was a Netscape, you might be wondering why it took them so long to get around to that. That’s a question that Varma answers right from the top — well, actually a couple of short paragraphs in:

“Why now? Although we’ve historically relied on our open source license for Firefox and public commitments to you, we are building in a much different technology landscape today. We want to make these commitments abundantly clear and accessible.”

Hmmm… I don’t know about you, but to me, “we are building in a much different technology landscape today,” sounds suspiciously like “we’re up to something and we’re going to blame it on the times.” Even more suspicious, the EULA Terms of Use isn’t even located on the page that announced its existence, you have to click a link to get there.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting. If you want to know what that Terms of Use EULA said last week when Varma first told us about it, then you’re going to have to find somebody who saved it. Why? Because even if you click to get there from Varma’s original blog, you’re going to see a “new and improved” version, because the first version created such a brouhaha that Varma had to report that some changes have been made:

“Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern. With that in mind, we’re updating the language to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data.”

The emphasis, made by Ajit and not me, is evidently to describe the amount of change between version one and two of Firefox’s EULA. We know that because Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn at The Register saved and published the pertinent part of that first version for all of us:

“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.”

Compare that to the latest and greatest version:

“It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”

In other words, according to Mozilla there’s nothing to see here. Move on.

That’s the End of the Story, Except…

That would be the end of the story, except that since Mozilla issued its EULA, a few things have disappeared from the organization’s FAQ page. Well… in a way only one thing has been removed, but it’s been removed from numerous places.

If you look at the question “What Is Firefox,” the phrase “doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers” used to be in the answer, but now is gone. To the question “is Firefox free?”, the phrase “we don’t sell your personal data” is now missing. Varma said that the reason for this is… well, there are a lot of different ways to define the word “sell”:

“In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.”

That last quote sounds way too much like Nixon’s Checkers speech to make me happy. At least that speech had a puppy in it.