What the heck is Mozilla/Firefox doing?!

Note: I am no lawyer, and I am not very familiar with the law. I am trying to make sense of the tricky language that is Lawyer, so please, take what I say with a grain of salt.

Recently, a statement from Firefox has left people worried: its Terms of Use. The Terms of Use is brand-new, and they made a little "whoopsies". The problem? It pretty much stated that Mozilla could read all data you input into Firefox, a.k.a. your passwords, files you upload, files you view, including personal files, and more.

Of course, Mozilla had to instantly update their notices just 2 days after creation from user backlash. You can find the current statement under the "You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions" section:
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. 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.
Pretty much, Mozilla will process your data as seen in the Privacy Notice, but will now also include a fact that it can process your data, at your request, the content you input in Firefox. "This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that context", they say. Again, they can read all the data you input into Firefox! Why they need this information is beyond my knowledge, because that means they will use my passwords and cookies to "help" with Firefox. This is very broad, and can be anything from diagnostic information to selling to advertisers, and is likely the latter.

What's tricky about this is that they use "doing as you request", but that is... tricky, I- I never went to lawyer school, and searching it up on Google tells me that it could mean doing something precisely as another party describes, and if that other party is Mozilla, that means Mozilla is double-crossing us! The best we can do is to wait this out and see what happens, or wait for a month to pass and Reject Convenience to make a video about it.

You really shouldn't be worried if you have a Firefox fork, or use Thunderbird, as these terms only apply to Firefox. If you feel worried, don't. The building I live in probably has toxic walls due to it being from before WWII, and yet I'm still here. Privacy may be hard to find online, but we are humans, and humans are strong. This is truly just a dumb update- if you want to stop this, don't use Firefox. That is simply how you don't comply, the only way you terminate this agreement. Live life well, and see you soon. l8r n00bz
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For my personal use I have been using only completely independent free-software forks of web browsers for many, many years now. Not dependent on any company behind it, no phoning-home to anything, just community-driven.
 
For my personal use I have been using only completely independent free-software forks of web browsers for many, many years now. Not dependent on any company behind it, no phoning-home to anything, just community-driven.
Doing security is hard. That is the problem with small forks. You don't have any idea if the maintainers are able to do it right and if they port all patches and on time -- and if there are enough tests on forks.

Browsers are THE attack surface anybody exposes.

I've tried several Firefox forks over the years. TOR Browser might be worth a look depending on what you are doing at the moment -- similar thing without TOR would be Mullvad Browser (which works fine without their VPN).

In the end there is not much one can do besides sandboxing a more private browser and hoping for no breach to occur.
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I have already seen the questionable rules from Mozilla as well as the backlash. In two days everything will be forgotten and people return to using Firefox. Hell, people are using Google Chrome. That says enough.

When preparing a PC for somebody else I have no choice but choosing a mainstream browser (which will be Firefox normally) and adjusting the settings as good as possible.
 
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Yeah i'm out. no more fox lol - only Chrome! :C
I wouldn't use Chrome if you are gonna be privacy-based, it's a whole 'nother level of hell. Plus no uBlock Origin soon/now. It also runs in the background when closed, so it can not only eat up your RAM when you use it, it can also eat up your RAM when you don't. Again, this Terms of Use is only for Firefox, so you can use forks that don't give you this nightmare.

You can also use Ladybird, although that is still in development and you need to build it from source.
 
For a long time now, Firefox has only been the browser you only went with becuase you didn't like chrome and want to falsely believe you're fighting the chromium dynasty (You're not, you're only delaying the day chromium gets ripped from google's hands by a competent team of lawyers from the FTC) or you liked using forks made by people who care more about coding than Mozilla does while also crippling your own web experience due to how long it takes for web standards actually get implemented, all while the majority of Mozilla has only been doing performative activism for several years now with that google paycheck to do some work on FF.
 

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