This must apply to Firefox itself, right?
Why do you think google buys the rights to firefox's search bar (as a default setting)?
well, a benefit is a benefit. It doesn't really matter how it manifests does it? It's not a donation, as it is not altruistic.
I didn't say you being a product is bad - but it does not align customer with software company. You may be OK with being sold as a product to google, as this relationship currently isn't damaging. But what if a future offer which would damage you is taken by mozilla because it's profitable?
To give you an example. Try to use Google Search without sending your data to Google. You cannot use the product without it, you cannot opt out. Firefox, you can use just fine with Google not being your search engine.
It's not a binary toggle - firefox is selling you as a source of revenue for themselves. They're just not making it as extreme as it is possible to be - in the hopes that you don't switch away.
You can compare same situation with safari in iOS. Except google pays a lot more, since you cannot switch away in iOS as easily, and culturally there's more reluctance compared to firefox users. This makes google pay more for iOS traffic, as those users are worth more.
The sense in which you are the product on Firefox is that they want to maintain a large enough user base that search licensing is valuable enough to sell to Google.
Because I can change that default and still use the thing. That's how it's very different.
Typically when people say that when something is free you are the product. They mean that it's free because your data is being sold, implying that without telemetry it wouldn't be free. That's not the case here as far as I know
Google is paying Mozilla to be the default search engine. Google is only paying Mozilla because Firefox has users, regardless if they use the default search engine or not. So, indirectly everyone is the 'product'.
I'm sure if 95% of people did swap to ddg, then google may change their mind.
Also I believe there is the possibility Google also pays Mozilla to offer competition so Chrome isn't considered a monopoly (but maybe Edge has changed that to some extent?)
"The service is free. Am I the product?"
That is a valid thing to ask. Even with FOSS sometimes.
Some FOSS projects are backed by companies, then yes, plausible to ask.
Otherwise, I would answer with a clear no.
(Projects can still collect telemetry and other data and sell that, though the sell part should be very rare, imo...)
Edit: Was that a bad faith argument or a honest question?
Sometimes I can't tell, maybe because of old or ESL...
i would default to this being the truth, until demonstrated otherwise. Call it cynical, but it's the cynical that survive.
Crowd sourced Development and Quality Assurance for something multiple companies, governments and the military are using.
This is such a un-nuanced take.
In this case Firefox's route-to-market is the product. It's a distribution channel where some people who receive the free version will upgrade.
Free tiers for products where some will pay to upgrade seems like a reasonable compromise, but it does depend on how the deal is structured.
If Mullvad pays Firefox for the free users then Firefox's incentives are aligned with its users.
If Mullvad pays per conversion then it's a different story.
The other aspect is I expect it would stain the IP pool further. VPN IPs often end up on various blacklists due to abuse and introducing a wave of free users would only make it worse for paying customers.
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
> Why no free plan? "Free" services nearly always come at some cost, whether that be the time you spend watching an intro ad, the collection of your data, or by limiting the functionality of the service. We don't operate that way – at all.
People think Mullvad is special but it's same shit as all the others in most cities/markets, I wish they would use some of their big ad money spend to deleverage from these typical dodgy scam hosting ASNs.
From OMG Ubuntu
Two huge reasons people use VPNs is piracy and saying things/accessing content that's not legal in their country. If that company has a legal presence in your country, then they'll hand over that data to the police should you criticize the wrong person or download a movie without permission. At which point a VPN becomes kind of pointless.
I probably won't use Mozilla's offering, because i want any VPN to cover the whole system, not just the browser (correct me if i've made a bad assumption here)
It's still correct though. In this context Mozilla uses the firefox-users as their test and demo base. At the end is commercial benefit.
And I think the core criticism still applies. Mozilla gave up on the browser years ago, let's be honest. It may be interesting from a historic point of view to find out how, when and why, but meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on already, so ...
They push million lines of new code every year, push thousands of patches, and regularly achieve performance measurable performance boosts to Webrender, the JavaScript and CSS rendering engines, on rapid release cycles that have improved speed and memory usage.
There are a lot of criticisms leveled at Mozilla some fair some unfair, but the amount of work poured into the browser is so extensively documented that there's no excuse for not knowing.
In this case, you stent being sold. They are providing a limited free version and hoping you upgrade.
- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
- Oct 2025. Sponsored “Privacy-Focused Direct Results” added to address bar. Not yet exposed in Settings UI.
- Dec 2025. Privacy Notice updated to formalize on-device ad processing and content personalization on New Tab. New Tab is actively marketed to advertisers as a native ad surface.
- You state that PPA is enabled by default, but it was an experimental feature that was never activated and later removed: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
- You state that Sponsored “Privacy-Focused Direct Results” were added to address bar, but 1. it's direct results in general, with some being sponsored and 2. it hasn't been released: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/better-search-suggestion.... The pref defaults to false in current stable.
- Yes, Anonym is an ad metrics firm, but you missed that it's focused on privacy. I am unsure whether they are actually able to achieve privacy or if it's just privacy-washing, but that's their stated goal. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/anonym/
- Privacy FAQ and TOS changes are true, but they rolled them back after backlash: (updated) https://www.thebridgechronicle.com/tech/mozilla-revises-fire... , (original) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...
- Privacy Notice update is true: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/update/dec2025...
I agree in principle, but we interact with hundreds of companies per day. Which ones are honest and which ones are taking advantage of us? I really don't have the cycles to run it all down, and keep up with it over time. Perhaps Firefox VPN will be totally private initially and then violate privacy 2 years in? Would I ever know? Maybe? I need to err on the side of caution for a lot of these decisions because so many companies are bad actors. I'm sure I don't always err correctly, but I don't have better options.
VPNs are no longer optional for the current internet. This is as controversial as Firefox speaking ftp.
I mean it's very provable that they sell access to your data and your eyeballs other companies.
Also, "free": "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold"
Y combinator absolutely profits from encouraging group think and positive attitudes about things they're involved in.
How else would you get a large part of the tech world to somehow believe that suckling on the teat of Venture capital until that elusive "exit" is the holy grail of business models?
When the valuable part is data collection, you don't get a choice in how your user data is sold.
When the valuable part is influencing opinions, you do get a choice in what you believe.
> HN is "free" too. :)
Indeed: you deliver valuable information about market trends, market sentiments, technology, ... to SV startups and investors.
Additionally, Hacker News is basically a marketing expense of YC.
For example, when you use the Google search engine, you are the product (Google's customers are advertisers). I hope you derive sufficient (average) value from each Google search so that you consider this to be worth it.
When paid for, I agree that is absolutely true.
When nearly free, thanks to team Daniel it's an input that can be weighted against paid options. The free but large crowd may have thought of things that paid think tank members members holding doctorates may not have. Great ideas are missed all the time and most often until it is too late. There may only be a few golden eggs and many bad eggs but there are quicker ways to sort that out nowadays without an Eggdicator and Oompa Loompas though I do miss the songs. One golden egg could pay for the entire cost of the staff running HN for a decade.
All of this crap that everyone keeps pulling into their browsers needs to be ripped back out and made a plugin or an extension. Stop shoving it in the core damn browser. I didn’t need the waste of space and I’m never going to touch it.
And for many non technical users that is very useful, if they can get that with a click. To get geoblocked content, etc.
Mozilla has done way worse things, much more distracting from their core mission - building a browser that people want to use and trust.
Of course the UI itself could be extracted into a plugin, but I'm not really a fan of the pattern of shipping a large feature and extract only the thin UI layer into a plugin. It felt very weird when Mozilla tried it with "multi-user containers".
Now, from where this cost is going to be recouped, how seamless the integration will be (in-browser translation is useful but the UX is not good enough), or if their VPN exit points aren't flagged to death as bad IPs; will remain to be seen.
The other thing about this feature, is that it will prove interesting in France and the UK; where it could be seen as a circumvention technique of the currently in place age restriction laws. And at the very least, it will bring those topics back into discussion.
My read: Identity theft
Happy to see that this solution is apparently using MASQUE, which is what iCloud Private Relay is also based on!
Also, "free": "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold"