Mozilla has a new privacy-focused data sharing platform that provides users with increased control of their data and also allows them to contribute to a better Internet.
Built in collaboration with Princeton University researchers, the new Mozilla Rally allows users to select who they want to share their browsing data with, the browser maker says.
The new platform, Mozilla says, was built with privacy and transparency at its core, but also allows users to contribute their browsing data to projects that could help build “a better Internet and a better society.”
Working with Professor Jonathan Mayer’s research group at Princeton University, Mozilla also introduced the Rally research initiative, a crowd-sourced scientific effort that enables researchers to launch studies about the web, including ones that hold major online services accountable.
Two research collaborator studies were included in the launch. The first, “Political and COVID-19 News,” comes from the Princeton team that worked on Rally research, while the second, “Beyond the Paywall,” developed in collaboration with Shoshana Vasserman and Greg Martin of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, focuses on news consumption and how to build a better ecosystem for online news platforms.
The launch was accompanied by the introduction of WebScience, a toolkit that helps researchers build standardized browser-based studies on Rally and which also encourages data minimization. Coming from the same team at Princeton, WebScience is co-maintained with Mozilla.
“With Rally, we’ve built an innovative, consent-driven data sharing platform that puts power back into the hands of people. By leveraging the scale of web browsers – a piece of software used by billions of people around the world – Rally has the potential to help address societal problems we could not solve before,” Mozilla says.
Now available for U.S. Firefox desktop users that are 19 or older, Rally is set to become available for more browsers and markets as well.
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