I'm a bit familiar with law (took 2 courses at uni) and understand how awkward the language can be.
For instance, maybe Mozilla has to say "you grant us the license" instead of "you grant Firefox the license" because licenses can only be granted to legal entities, and Firefox is merely a software.
And it's also true that you don't navigate the internet directly; you use the UI of Firefox to enter your data, and then Firefox uses it to send requests to the server. It acts on your behalf, exactly as the text says.
Those were my initial thoughts based on my limited knowledge about law. It might very well be wrong.
But the problem is indeed what a lawyer could do with this, and I'm sure it grants Mozilla more rights than necessary. I also find it suspicious that none of this was an issue for over 20 years, so why would it be now?
Just to be clear, I didn't see the Mozilla TOS change and immediately went ahead to join the outrage. I initially had a more charitable interpretation and waited to see if it's a misunderstanding and what others had to say. Then the commit showed up where they removed the promise to never sell our data, and there's really no positive way to look at this.
The problem is that you can't see that from my activity on here.
Random social media musings
I'm seeing some posts in my timeline by people who are fed up with the Mozilla drama, and I get it. Microblogging and this "we YOLO everything into a global context" is shit. It's pure and utter garbage that makes it impossible to avoid things that annoy you.
I kept mentioning forums lately because I'm on some kind of nostalgia trip, and if you're expecting me to say that they didn't have this problem, then you'd be absolutely right. HOWEVER, they do have disadvantages.
What makes microblogging so enticing is the way lower friction. You can just post whatever comes to your mind, and that's it. I don't think you could lower the barrier any further since it's already lying on the ground.
The reason why it was easier to avoid unwanted topics on forums is that they had structure. Structure that's completely missing on here. We have hashtags at best, but they're too ad-hoc to be of much use and they won't fix the "everything is global" thing.
How could microblogging be fixed? I'm not sure. The fact of the matter is that any attempt to add structure means pushing up the barrier, and people are amazingly resistant to improvements if they mean extra work. If we add the ability to have multiple timelines, you can be sure a lot of people will set up just one called "everything lmao" and defeat the whole purpose.
Structuring in forums only worked because there was a staff to firmly enforce it, but the volume of posts with microblogging is orders of magnitude higher. We can't expect moderators to look at every single post and make sure it has the right metadata. So what could even be done?
Volpeon