The other day I stumbled across a reminder that in February of 2025 Mozilla deleted the following piece of their FAQ.

Does Firefox sell your personal data?

Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

Some people have tried to defend them pointing to the current entry on their privacy FAQ (Jan 2026).

It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.

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.

Here’s the thing. That doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Back in 2010, I used to work in a company that did targeted advertising. We didn’t need your “personal” data, and we didn’t want it. The tech was so good that it honestly wouldn’t have helped us. We just needed to be able to drop a cookie on you like all advertisers did. We didn’t even really need to do that, it was just easier. We could reconcile two “identities” resulting from different browsers / VPN / whatever and mush them back together.

Knowing your name? Your precise location? Advertisers didn’t care about any of that. They just wanted to know if you were someone likely to buy what they were selling. If we stuck their ad in front of the right person the odds of it getting a click increased. And we were really good. Like scary good.

There was a - probably apocryphal - story that Target had hired a company to do targeted advertising for them and send out coupons to pregnant mothers. New moms spend a lot of money on baby products, and Target wanted to get them to start those years of shopping with them. According to the story, a woman was sent coupons for baby products before she even realized she was pregnant.

The thing was, it didn’t matter if it was actually a true story or not, because we knew that it was entirely possible with the tech we had in 2010. We could predict, with scary accuracy what you would buy within the next month. With larger purchases, like cars, we could predict it about a year out.

We had zero personally identifiable data. We didn’t need it, and having it would have been a liability.

So, Mozilla telling you they’re not selling your “personal” data? It’s a misleading statement to make you feel they have your best interests at heart. They don’t. If they did, they would say that they don’t sell or share “your data”.

Obviously, no-one wants their personal data being sold, but the people who want to know what you’re planning? They don’t need it, and they don’t care anyway. If they wanted to send something to your home they could just buy a mailing list targeted to your demographic. Anyone can do it.

Similarly, TikTok being Chinese owned and getting your data? That’s just more misleading political bullshit. China - along with anyone else who wanted it - already had your data. Selling your data is big business in the US. We have no meaningful laws against it, and no meaningful penalties for leaking your private data.

The only meaningful privacy statement is a claim that a company will not share your data and will not work with advertisers. Anything less is misleading bullshit. Even if you disagree, Mozilla removed their promise to never sell your personal data. That’s pretty telling.

If you’re actually concerned about this, then - hopefully obviously - switching to Chrome is not a good idea. It’s controlled by one of the world’s largest advertising companies (Google) who has taken active steps to prevent good ad-blockers like UBlock Origin from working.

There are alternatives though:

• Waterfox is a downstream fork of Firefox that disables their AI bullshit, exposes some hidden settings, and sets the privacy defaults to where most people would reasonably expect them.
• LibreWolf is another downstream fork of Firefox for people who want to take additional steps to protect their privacy online. It has stricter defaults for cookies, tracking, and fingerprinting, which sounds great, but is likely to have some negative impacts on your browsing experience. Obviously, they also disable Mozilla’s AI features.

Its important to the health of the internet, and to the freedom of information, for us to use a browser not controlled by one of the worlds largest advertising companies; a browser that isn’t controlled by a company that limits what people see based on the whims of local governments.

Right now, Firefox based browsers are the best option we have, but Mozilla.com (the for profit company) has been focusing all its energy on increasing profits, and Mozilla.org (the non-profit who gets all the press) very clearly does whatever Mozilla.com says. Mozilla’s users very clearly do not want AI shoved into their browsers, but they’re doing it anyway. Mozilla’s users want privacy, and Mozilla.org promotes the idea that they’ll protect yours, but they work with advertisers, and refuse to say they won’t sell or share your data.

It’s time for Mozilla to die. It has been corrupted from within. It’s time for the downstream forks to work together to create a “hard fork” of Firefox, a core codebase build on shared beliefs that users, and their privacy matter. LibreWolf, and Waterfox can still put their own spin on that. Making a version catered to the desires of their users.