Mozilla Partners With Researchers for Privacy-Focused Platform

It’s no secret that companies are quietly siphoning your data every time you go online. Mozilla believes that people should have more control over their data. That’s why it is launching Rally, a “privacy-first” data sharing platform designed to provide users with more agency on how their data is collected, used and shared, the company announced. Friday.

“Cutting people out of decisions about their data is an inequity that harms individuals, society and the internet. We believe you need to determine who benefits from your data,” said Rebecca Weiss, head of the Rally project at Mozilla, in a company blog post.

This add-on to Mozilla’s Firefox web browser allows people to donate their browsing data to computer scientists, sociologists, and other academics studying the web. This research focuses on building new resources, tools and “potentially even policies that enable people like you to build a better internet and fight exploitative technology,” according to Mozilla.

“A core focus of the initiative is to enable unprecedented studies that hold key online services accountable,” the company said.

Alongside the Rally, Mozilla is also launching a toolkit called WebScience to help researchers build standardized browser-based studies on its new platform. The company says WebScience is designed to encourage data minimization, otherwise the practice of limiting data collection to only what is necessary for a specific purpose.

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Mozilla’s already partnered with Princeton University for a collaborative study to better understand how people engage with news and misinformation about politics and covid-19. At some point in the future, Stanford University’s “Beyond the Paywall” project will also examine news consumption and the economics needed to build a more sustainable ecosystem for news outlets.

Ultimately, Weiss said Rally aims to identify and understand some of the “biggest problems of the internet” with the goal of making it a better place.

Rally is only available to Firefox users in the United States for more than 19 years, but Mozilla said it plans to launch access to more countries and web browsers in the future.