Apple wants your credit card on file for you to do impulse shopping. Apple would also like you to buy a new device every few years. It has little interest in your personal data, but it will hold on to it if you want a backup.
Google has a different business model, in which “getting to know the users” is essential.
I can't imagine Firefox OS won't have a cloud component. Already Firefox has a syncing service.
In the end, every consumer has to choose for themselves who to trust with their information. Mozilla's future business model isn't clear to me, right now it is way too dependent on Google. Just as I don't trust Google with my information, right now I don't trust Mozilla with it.
With their (partly) nonprofit status and history of open development, Mozilla is maybe the only player in tech that I _would_ trust with my information. That's why I find Firefox OS really exciting.
They have an interesting setup with a for-profit corporation (Mozilla Corp.), which is wholly owned by a nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. So as I understand it, they can make money, but are obligated to stick to the foundation's stated goals. Something like that... it sounds like a clever legal hack.
Pretty much all their development happens in the open, and you can read the details of everything they're working on on the wiki. https://wiki.mozilla.org/ And they designed Firefox Sync with end-to-end encryption, so they couldn't possibly read your bookmarks. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ You can't go farther to protect privacy than that.
As for the Google connection, apparently Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo were competing for the contract to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is why Google ended up paying so much more recently (December 2011) than last time: https://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almo...
I bet this is a big reason why Google is fighting so hard to get people over to Chrome. If they erode Firefox's market share enough, that price will go down. But so far, it doesn't look like Mozilla has made any concessions to Google. Rather the reverse.
>It has little interest in your personal data, but it will hold on to it if you want a backup.
I find that statement to be incredibly naive. Personal data has immense value to companies and Apple already has experience in advertising.
There's also a big difference between Apple and Mozilla. Apple clearly wants all your data in their iCloud and the new version of OS X will seemingly push that aggressively. Mozilla on the otherhand uses client side encryption for Sync and you can run your own Sync server. [1]
Google has a different business model, in which “getting to know the users” is essential.
I can't imagine Firefox OS won't have a cloud component. Already Firefox has a syncing service.
In the end, every consumer has to choose for themselves who to trust with their information. Mozilla's future business model isn't clear to me, right now it is way too dependent on Google. Just as I don't trust Google with my information, right now I don't trust Mozilla with it.