Mozilla on Tuesday announced that Alan Davidson has been named the organization’s new Vice President of Global Policy, Trust and Security.
According to Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Denelle Dixon, Davidson will work with her on scaling and reinforcing the organization’s “policy, trust and security capabilities and impact.”
His responsibilities will also include leading Mozilla’s public policy work on promoting an open and “healthy” Internet, and supervising a security and trust team whose focus is on promoting “innovative privacy and security features.”
“For over 15 years, Mozilla has been a driving force for a free and open Internet, building open source products with industry-leading privacy and security features. I am thrilled to be joining an organization so committed to putting the user first, and to making technology a force for good in people’s lives,” said Davidson.
Prior to joining Mozilla, Davidson worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce, the New America think tank, and Google. At Google, he helped launch the tech giant’s Washington D.C. office and led the company’s public policy and government relations efforts in the Americas.
“Alan is not new to Mozilla,” Dixon said. “He was a Mozilla Fellow for a year in 2017-2018. During his tenure with us, Alan worked on advancing policies and practices to support the nascent field of public interest technologists — the next generation of leaders with expertise in technology and public policy who we need to guide our society through coming challenges such as encryption, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, cybersecurity, and more.”
Mozilla last week laid out plans to add various anti-tracking features to Firefox in an effort to protect users and help them choose what information they share with the websites they visit.
The new features include a mechanism designed to block trackers that slow down page loads, stripping cookies and blocking storage access from third-party tracking content, and blocking trackers that fingerprint users and sites that silently mine cryptocurrencies. Some of these new features are already present in Firefox Nightly and are expected to become available in the stable release of the web browser in the near future.
Related: Mozilla to Researchers: Stay Away From User Data and We Won’t Sue