Firefox recently updated their terms of service, and when a company updates their terms it’s rarely in favour of the user. Take this line in the new Firefox terms.

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.

If you go back to the blog post I linked first there is now a disclaimer about that line though.

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.

I don’t know if the line has been in there terms of service for a while or if it’s new. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t understand the legal meanings behind the line in their terms of service. I know a browser needs access to a bunch of your data while you’re using it so it can transmit that data to the websites you’re using. I needs to pass keystrokes to forms, send and receive cookies and many other things.

In part, this isn’t the fault of Firefox. Every company out there seems to be trying to steal as much of our data as possible all the time. That means when we see a terms update we assume it’s so a company can steal more of our data or screw us over in some other way.

I hate that I have to look around now for what people more knowledgeable than me think about the Firefox terms, but I have to spend time doing that. Then I may have to spend time looking for a new browser?