I wish to some day have as much optimism about anything as you have about Mozilla. How you can see the ToS change and this diff and conclude that the outrage is astroturfing is difficult for me to grasp. Both this FAQ entry and the ToS are specifically about the Firefox browser, the wording was unambiguous...
They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ...
There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“)
> calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.
The paragraph I'm referring to in that diff does not appear to be replaced directly by anything, it just got removed. They did, however, add that non-answer paragraph separately, apparently hours ago.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious. They're making steps in a certain direction. Enshittification doesn't usually happen entirely overnight, but you don't have to extrapolate a whole lot to see the blatantly obvious eventuality this is all pointing to. This is well beyond typical levels of brazen for a first step.
Realistically, Google removing "Don't be evil" also didn't really mean anything directly, either... but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything.
"the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate"
Agreed, it's a ridiculous mischaracterization and part of a pattern that's become a self-sustaining spiral with no quality control.
I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
I think the worst of the worst were on Lemmy where similar conversations happen and one person looked at a 990 form from the Mozilla Foundation, a standard non-profit disclosure form, and breathlessly went through the lines as if they were evidence of a conspiracy.
I don't think everyone makes arguments that bad, but I think exposure to this normalized, low-quality discourse has socialized people into perpetuating the narrative with increasingly tenuous arguments.
It's perfectly normal to hold good actors to a higher standard than bad actors. And the leadership should be fired instead of rewarding itself. What if they put 10% of the hundred million a year they got from Google for the last dozen years into an endowment instead? They'd be sustainable without needing to sell out.
I don't know if you read everything that I laid out, but none of the above had anything to do with holding the good actors to hire standards. Thinking that a 990 form is secret evidence of a conspiracy because the nonprofit spent like $10,000 on a consultant here and there is at a fundamental level a form of information illiteracy. It's not like a principled attempt to hold them to a higher standard.
And my contention is that it's things like those that increasingly are what people mean when they say "everything" bad Mozilla is doing. It's more like a tulip craze than a well thought out argument.
> Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue.
I fully support Mozilla. I don't think this change is bad. However, I do think executive pay should be reined in. Not just the CEO but the board as well. It is also not just about the money but the culture as well. I sincerely believe the CEO shouldn't make more than the median employee salary. This is too much.
If a CEO typically works 12-16 hours a day with no overtime pay I'm fine if he earns more than the employee who doesn't do overtime or gets paid. I also don't care if he earns slightly more than everybody else. It being median pay is certainly exaggerating.
But unfortunately, many CEOs make at least 10 times the money of the median and often 100x or more.
In my experience, I have been "exempt" even though I have zero supervisory or management authority as an individual contributor. If there are people like me in any organization, the CEO should not get extra pay for being exempt.
Yes, it is a little extreme to demand median pay but this is the starting point of a conversation to highlight that CEO make 10 or 100 maybe more times the median salary.
>However, I do think executive pay should be reined in.
I do too, but let's keep our eye on the ball for a second. CEO pay is not (1) driving Mozilla towards unprofitability, (2) taking developer resources away from critical investments in the browser (3) the reason why the market share is lower (4) a revelation of malevolent intent regarding user data and privacy (5) an indicator of moral equivalence with Google.
It's a vague generality that's barely about anything, but it's half made arguments like these that are driving perceptions in these threads.
