This week, Mozilla unveiled its first Terms of Service for Firefox, but the company has already had to publish an update to respond to criticism of wording that appeared to give Mozilla too broad ownership rights over user data.
In particular, some users expressed dissatisfaction with this line in the terms, as reported by TechCrunch: “When you upload or enter information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, use, and interact with online content as you indicate when you use Firefox.”
In response, Mozilla added this update to its blog. “We need the license so that we can implement some of the basic features of Firefox,” Mozilla says. “Without it, we couldn’t, for example, use the information you enter in Firefox.
The company adds that “this does NOT give us ownership of your data or the right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.” (In the Privacy Notice, Mozilla explains how it uses your data for things like basic Firefox functionality and features, as well as how to customize the data you provide.)
Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel also told TechCrunch that “these changes are not related to Mozilla’s desire to use people’s data for artificial intelligence or sell it to advertisers. As stated in the Terms of Use, we ask permission from users to use their data to run Firefox ‘as you direct by using Firefox’. This means that our ability to use the data is still limited to what we disclose in the Privacy Notice.”
In its initial blog post, Mozilla noted that “some optional Firefox features or services may require us to collect additional data to make them work, and when we do, your privacy remains our priority.” The company added that “we intend to be clear about what data we collect and how we use it.”
