This implies they had some sinister plan to claim all your data as theirs or something which is ridiculous - they didn’t back down from anything but changed the wording of the legal text to make it easier to parse for non-lawyers.
There is no other interpretation of changing "we respect your privacy and do not sell your data" to "we respect your privacy".
Mozilla even tried to claim the old wording was bad because some governments erroneously define "sell" as "to exchange something for valuable consideration, such as money".