Critics said the new terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input or upload through Firefox.
Critics said the new terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input or upload through Firefox.
The article goes into the first point though.
Using those services on your behalf is, potentially (in a legal sense) use of your data. By providing some information to a third party, even if Firefox itself doesn’t itself use it. This may come from the fact that you don’t directly agree to terms with the third parties when you start using the browser, with safe browsing for example. So Firefox is in a sense using/sharing private information. And in the changing legal landscape this usage may fall under modern privacy laws, such as the one mentioned in the article.
I agree the old wording was bad, but I do see the reasoning behind the new one.
If that’s all this is, then it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to provide a list of all the third parties they transmit data to and why; they could divide it out by “on by default” and “off by default,” and include the data that’s sent to them and how it’s anonymized or aggregated. That would be the easiest possible way to quell the concerns of users, but they’re still being cagey about all of that.