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As promised, here is an interview with @ryanleesipes from #Thunderbird, on the whole #Mozilla and #Firefox terms of use situation.

We talk about why this had to happen, how Thunderbird will handle their own Terms of Use, what's happening at Mozilla, and what's changing.

youtube.com/watch?v=ctg5QzSt5tg

@thelinuxEXP @ryanleesipes

“Why this had to happen”? Well, that's certainly ominous and gaslight-y (because no, it didn't have to happen).

Will next be asserting the right to scrape and sell the contents of our emails as well?

@argv_minus_one @ryanleesipes It actually did have to happen, du to regulator pressures. How it was done isn’t good, IMO, but they did have to add terms of use.

argv minus one

@thelinuxEXP

Quoth the ToU announcement:

> the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Mozilla is not supposed to be doing any of that!

@ryanleesipes

@argv_minus_one @thelinuxEXP I'll have to ask about this. But I think Firefox is considering the transfer of search queries to Google as a sale of personal data, since they have a default search engine agreement with them.

@ryanleesipes

Do you mean the search suggestions that appear before the user presses Enter to actually perform the search?

Yes, I saw that and find it rather creepy. Novices won't know about the privacy implications of this. Firefox should ask for specific consent for this during setup, like the Microsoft Edge privacy options screen.

1/

@thelinuxEXP

@ryanleesipes

Do you mean search queries sent when the user presses Enter in the search box?

I don't see how that qualifies as “personal information” when the user intentionally submits it to Google. But I suppose the lawyers may have a different interpretation. 🤷‍♂️

2/

@thelinuxEXP

@ryanleesipes

Either way, what's stopping Mozilla from saying “we don't sell your data except x, y, and z”?

This open-ended “we can take and sell basically anything we want” non-commitment to user privacy doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what was supposed to be a privacy-oriented browser.

3/end

@thelinuxEXP

@ryanleesipes How are search queries by themselves "personal data"? Note too that CCPA explicitly excludes de-identified and aggregated data from being qualified as personal information. And searching on Google via Firefox's search bar is not covered by Mozilla's privacy policy, but by Google's, because Firefox is merely just a tool, not a service.

@argv_minus_one @thelinuxEXP