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Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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It seems like a profit-driven thing to me. Big piles of anonymized data are worth a pretty penny.
Mozilla famous non-profit status notwithstanding of course
Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned subsidiary that is Mozilla Corporation that is for-profit.
For instance the revenue from Google, so they’re the default search engine, is seen by Mozilla Corporation. So things search-related will indeed be part of their for-profit arm.
It's technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.
Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that's independent of for-/non-profit status.
I’d like to read more on that if you have anything. Seems like too big a loophole ?
It’s not a loophole. As a subsidiary, profits are still invested into the nonprofit and they’re still guided by the Mozilla manifesto. It just lets them do more and raise more funds which would be difficult to do with nonprofit status (selling default search engine for instance). Here’s their original press release when they incorporated Mozilla Corporation in 2005.
A non-profit can, in fact, profit, but it has specific rules on what it can do with those profits. Tax law is a rabbit hole and I don't even wanna peer in
Used to work for a non-profit retirement community in a pretty small area; the guy running the joint lived in a $3M "house" with a full 7 car garage.
Enshitification hits every company, even Mozilla.
Unfortunately Mozilla is being run by a McKinsey consultant.