I’m not going to watch the video so my comment is based on the title (why everything needs to be a video nowadays, just give me an article to read or at least a summary together with the video…)

Yeah no fucking shit… And Tesla is not even the worse out there (and not for a lack of trying), if you consider the analysis done by the Mozilla foundation of the privacy policies of a bunch of major car companies. You dont even have to be the owner of the car, if you ride in one as a passenger you are giving permission for the use of your data in the most crazy absurd ways.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/

There’s just no company to be trusted. Unless your car is very old, you dont have privacy.

Yeah, absolutely, I think these changes done for Firefox are not “that” common, but they are not unheard of either. I have been trying to remember what was it the news that made me think of this kind of terms of use before, some other service doing very similar changes with similar intent. But I just can’t remember it…

With all of this I dont intend to imply that we have nothing to worry and we can trust in Mozilla without second thought. Each of their actions need to be consider as their own and it wouldn’t be the first time they have some misstep. With that out of the way, this particular situation is not the red flag or big issue that many might immediately think it is.

As for the reasons as to why this is happening right now, I have a couple of guesses. One is AI, and the usage of user data for their training and so on, Mozilla is just trying to clarify in legalese what they are allowed to do with our data when we use their software, likely looking towards the future to protect themselves in case it’s needed. The other guess I have for this kind of change is the current situation with IP owners and intermediaries. In essence I am talking of how ISPs and VPNs are under attack for the use of their services by their users.

But anyway, like I said I’m no expert in legalese, this whole topic seems “OK” to me, but we’ll need to keep our eyes open for any future misconduct or overreach by Mozilla with these new terms.

I’m not an expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but here’s what I feel has been more and more the case… It’s interesting that the examples you set are all hardware communicating with other hardware. That is a key point because any company selling you those devices can easily defend themselves legally if you decide to sue them for using your data just by saying “how else would we get the device working? It is fundamental to read your data to make the device do what is advertised for” and the case would be dropped faster than my dog comes when I open his food. Now imagine the keyboard company is caught sending the key strokes to their servers… Without a good terms of use contract they would lose immediately against legal action. And even a terms of use contract might be considered null if it is proven to be abusive or something.

When it comes to a software company things get a lot blurrier. It’s harder to define the needs for some actions and how things could work vs how they work. So I think it’s not uncommon to have this kind of clauses in such cases, specially for getting user data for maintenance and so on. It was less common in the past but as there are more practical cases and experience of where the law draws lines and limits this kind of additions and edits of user contracts are becoming pretty normal.

Great analysis you did there of the terms of use and the privacy notice! Just as soon as I read the title of the post I knew people would have a knee-jerk reaction to it. We can blame them for not actually going to read exactly what it is about, but I can’t blame them for the pessimistic point of view, although it seems to be very prevalent around Lemmy where you are supposed to hate everything and everyone that does something against their opinion. I wish people would try to put more attention into not being manipulated on their opinions by every sentence they read, specially when it aligns with their beliefs.

Again, thank you for putting the effort of sharing your opinion and checking the ToU.

I’m cross posting my own post here to try and give these communities a bit of life :) I hope that’s alright with the mods.