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.
We’re introducing a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time, along with an updated Privacy Notice.
Why now? Although we’ve historically relied on our open source license for Firefox and public commitments to you, we are building in a much different technology landscape today. We want to make these commitments abundantly clear and accessible.
While for most companies these are pretty standard legal documents, at Mozilla we look at things differently. We lay out our principles in our Manifesto:
- Your security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
- You deserve the ability to shape the internet and your own experiences on it — including how your data is used.
- We believe that practicing transparency creates accountability and trust.
Firefox will always continue to add new features, improve existing ones, and test new ideas. We remain dedicated to making Firefox open source, but we believe that doing so along with an official Terms of Use will give you more transparency over your rights and permissions as you use Firefox. And actually asking you to acknowledge it is an important step, so we’re making it a part of the standard product experience starting in early March for new users and later this year for existing ones.
In addition to the Terms of Use, we are providing a more detailed explanation of our data practices in our updated Privacy Notice. We tried to make these easy to read and understand — there shouldn’t be any surprises in how we operate or how our product works.
