As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Yes. That is selling. If you exchange customer data for money or other valuables, that is the definition of "selling".

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 61 points 1 week ago (20 children)

Not in all cases.

As an example, Firefox has the option of sponsored results, which send anonymized technical data when a link is clicked, essentially just saying "hey, this got an ad click, add it to the total." It doesn't send info about you, your identity, or your other browsing habits.

This counts as a "sale" even though no actual identifying information about you was exchanged. They mention this in the paragraphs I attached, when they talk about data sent via OHTTP.

I don't think any reasonable person would consider a packet being sent saying "some unknown user, somewhere in the world clicked your sponsored post" as "selling your personal information", but that's how the CCPA could be used to classify it, so to avoid getting in legal trouble, Firefox can't technically say that they "never sell your data", even if that's the extent of it.

[–] elbucho@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago (11 children)

This counts as a “sale” even though no actual identifying information about you was exchanged. They mention this in the paragraphs I attached, when they talk about data sent via OHTTP.

I mean... it should count as a sale, because it's a sale. They are selling information about browsing habits for money. Regardless of whether they include identifying information, it is still personal data that they are selling. They removed that line from their FAQs because they changed their minds about selling personal data. It has fuck all to do with weird legal definitions. They promised they wouldn't ever sell personal data, and then they were like "wellll......"

[–] balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 3 points 1 week ago

Sure, it counts. Which is Firefox's point. If you make a definition super broad, and some people will always try to extend the meaning of words until they explode like a Samsung battery, then you need to protect yourself by removing language that might be in contrast to that extremely broad definition. You can assign whatever nefarious intent you want to mozilla but their claims make logical internal sense.

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