That article is well over a year old. The current privacy FAQ right now explicitly states:
> We never sell your personal data. Unlike other big tech companies that collect and profit off your personal information, we’re built with privacy as the default. We don’t know your age, gender, precise location, or other information Big Tech collects and profits from.
Went to that FAQ again, and it contains false claims. They say:
> we’re built with privacy as the default.
Which is not the case, they are built with monitoring, calling-home and transmission of quite a bit of telemetry as the default.
> We don’t know your age, gender, precise location, or other information Big Tech collects and profits from.
They know my imprecise location by default, since they have their browser send my IP to them. I don't know whether the host of other information affords a statistical determination of age or gender; but the supposed "non-personal data" they collect, when correlated with data available to other companies like Alphabet, may well allow determining age and gender or even full personal identification.
> We never sell your personal data.
It doesn't say we never sell your data, period.
It doesn't say we never sell the results of processing your personal data.
It doesn't say we never _provide_ personal data collected from you (i.e. not through a sale). Nor could it, because the US government assumes the power to secretly obtain data about people from tech companies. The legal mechanism is in place (NSL)'s, and we know it has been in massive use, thanks to the Snowden leaks.
They pulled back on the websife change after backlash, but trust takes a long time to rebuild.
Also, don't go by the FAQ. Go by the actual terms and conditions.
Remember part of their original response to the controversy was to say "we don't sell your data, we just give it out in exchange for money" so I'm inclined to ignore anything from them that says "we don't sell" as they clearly don't know what it means.
The trust was lost because of the public's misunderstanding of the change. It was updated as a response to the overly broad legal definitions of "data sales" under laws like the CCPA. As your own link says, Mozilla explicitly stated:
> 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.
Mozilla lost trust rewriting their policy, and even more trust when they blamed their users for being "confused"[0] IMO. They're the ones with the lawyers and the sponsorships. All blame for "confusion" rests upon the party with the legal upper hand.
Do you know what the "overly broad definition" of "sell data" they cited was? It was "to exchange personal information for money or other things of value".
That's not overly broad. That's what selling is. That's what they told us they were doing. So they told us they were selling our data.
> They rewrote the terms almost immediately after the backlash. They also claimed the original terms were written in response to the overly broad legal definitions of "data sales" under laws like the CCPA. Which tbh sounds reasonable
