Mozilla introduces TOS to Firefox

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

Notice: This Article Requires Additional Expansion

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How You Can Help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

⚠️ Article status notice: This article has been marked as incomplete

This article needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. In particular:

1. This article uses "open source" improperly. Firefox is demonstrably open-source.

This notice will be removed once the issue/s highlighted above have been addressed and sufficient documentation has been added to establish the systemic nature of these issues. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the discord and post to the #appeals channel.

Learn more ▼

This Article Requires Additional Verification

---

This article has been flagged due to verification concerns. While the topic might have merit, the claims presented lack citations that live up to our standards, or rely on sources that are questionable or unverifiable by our standards. Articles must meet the Moderator Guidelines and Mission statement; factual accuracy and systemic relevance are required for inclusion here!

Why This Article Is In Question

---

Articles in this wiki are required to:

• Provide verifiable & credible evidence to substantiate claims.
• Avoid relying on anecdotal, unsourced, or suspicious citations that lack legitimacy.
• Make sure that all claims are backed by reliable documentation or reporting from reputable sources.

Examples of issues that trigger this notice:

• A topic that heavily relies on forum posts, personal blogs, or other unverifiable sources.
• Unsupported claims with no evidence or citations to back them up.
• Citations to disreputable sources, like non-expert blogs or sites known for spreading misinformation.

How You Can Improve This Article

---

To address verification concerns:

• Replace or supplement weak citations with credible, verifiable sources.
• Make sure that claims are backed by reputable reporting or independent documentation.
• Provide additional evidence to demonstrate systemic relevance and factual accuracy. For example:
  • Avoid: Claims based entirely on personal anecdotes or hearsay without supporting documentation.
  • Include: Corporate policies, internal communications, receipts, repair logs, verifiable video evidence, or credible investigative reports.

If you believe this notice has been placed in error, or once the article has been updated to address these concerns, please visit the #appeals channel on our Discord server: Join here.

In February 2025 Mozilla introduced terms of use (TOS) for the Firefox browser for the first time as well as an updated privacy policy. The new privacy policy has caused concern among the browser's user revolving around the way the section that describes the rights Mozilla has over their data is phrased.

Background

Mozilla anounced on the 26th of February 2025 the introduction of TOS and an update privacy policy for the Firefox web browser. In the topics outlined in the TOS past use of the browser and transparency around it was handled via the open source licence and public commitments by the organization.

Questionable phrashing in the TOS and consumer response

The new terms contain phrasing that has caused concer by the users of Firefox and the reasoning for its inclusion in the privacy focused browser. Concers center especially around the phrasing of terms outlined in the section titled "You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions":

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

The vagueness of the terms has resulted in users questioning how much of their data they were granting Mozilla a licence to use, especially since the company puts a lot of emphasis on transparency and privacy on their manifesto.

Date of effect

It is also worth noting that the announcement of the introduction of the TOS and new privacy policy was made in a blog post one day after the terms and privacy policy are to take effect. No other communication was made to users of the browser as of February 27th 2025.

Mozilla's response

Partial screenshot of lawful basis section for data usage from the Firefox privacy policy.

At the time of writing Mozilla has not issued an official response but has updated the initial blog post to inclutde the following:

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

While not putting concerns to rest due to the broadness that can be attributed to the terms the privacy policy does contain fairly extensive and clear statements on how data is to be used by the company.

See also

• Mozilla