It’s about expectations. In very simple language: people expect Microsoft and Google to track the hell out of them. But Mozilla says they are your friend and respects privacy, but then their actions speak the opposite.
A betrayal from a friend is harder to handle than a blow from an enemy.
Mozilla's goals are still much more aligned with my own than any other browser vendor. Not even close. It's not a betrayal, it's a difference of opinion between friends.
Edit: If that. I personally think this Terms of Use thing is a storm in a teacup.
Are they? Their incentive is to maintain their revenue stream, almost all of which currently comes from Google. That source is now under threat so, to continue being able to pay the bills, they need to find another. And it's a big hole to fill.
Yes, Firefox is the best bad option. But I'm not sure how we dont classify it as a betrayal to remove these statements:
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.
and
...Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data...
While also weaseling your words about your new policy and how its "basically the same thing if you think about it" [1]
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ - "Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
> Edit: If that. I personally think this Terms of Use thing is a storm in a teacup.
You may be right, yeah. I don't actually use Firefox, there was something else they did like this before which spooked me off. I was mainly explaining the seemingly odd response people have about this, and why they created a storm.
It's like a friend who says they are your friend, but then don't act like it. As opposed to say a known asshole being an asshole, people don't make a big deal about that any longer.
The same effect applies to political parties. The people that care about X focus their complaints to the party that is trying to address issues with X.
Yeah, pretty much. If you look historically, it's always that traitors and betrayers get the most severe punishment. It just wakes up something very basic in humans.
A betrayal from a friend is harder to handle than a blow from an enemy.