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Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. There seems to be an assumption that users will be gleeful to throw their

Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. There seems to be an assumption that users will be gleeful to throw their data at legitimate researchers from legitimate institutions doing legitimate work. What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else? Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here. As a nerd I can read between the lines—clearly they have come up with some sort of privacy-preserving data collection system that is useful. But at face value this whole article is just saying "hey use Firefox and give your data to scientists for reasons we don't bother to explain because obviously it's good."

grumblenum 5y ago
I read it as "we're protecting your privacy by increasing the number of people who can monitor your activity on our browser." Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. I'm starting to see a theme of papering over their technology products with a lot of modern art and hyperbolic language. "Computer scientists, social scientists and other researchers will be able to launch groundbreaking studies about the web and invite you to participate." Wow. I'm about to make history with a browser add-on! "Our first study is “Political and COVID-19 News” and comes from the Princeton team that helped us develop the Rally research initiative." Groundbreaking! College students can now make sure that I am adequately fact-checked if I err from the path of truth.
- dhimes 5y ago
  College students can now make sure that I am adequately fact-checked if I err from the path of truth. I don't think they are "making sure" as in "enforcing." It sounds like they are observing and reporting, hopefully in an aggregated fashion.
- jonathanmayer 5y ago
  > Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. Nope. This is an important point: the type of crowdsourced science that Rally enables is something that researchers couldn't do before. (With the exception of a very small number of teams who made massive investments in building single-purpose crowdsourcing infrastructure from the ground up.)
  - ysavir 5y ago
    Could you provide more detail on what makes it novel?
    - jonathanmayer 5y ago
      Common research methods have significant limitations. Web crawls, for instance, usually don't realistically simulate user activity and experiences. Lab studies often involve simplified systems that don't generalize to the real world. Surveys yield self-reported data, which can be very unreliable. Rally studies, by contrast, reflect real-world user activity and experiences. In science jargon, Rally enables field studies and intervention experiments with excellent ecological validity.
      - ysavir 5y ago
        Thanks for clarifying! Makes sense. A few follow up questions: 1. Do you expect the opt-in nature of these studies to impact their findings? 2. To compensate for the voluntary nature of the studies, do you think researchers in general will still be incentivized to find data sources that are less respectful of people's privacy and don't require an opt-in to the study?
        jonathanmayer 5y ago
        > 1. Do you expect the opt-in nature of these studies to impact their findings? The Rally participant population is not representative of the U.S. population—these are users who run Firefox (other browsers coming soon), choose to join Rally, and choose to join a study. In research jargon, there's significant sampling bias. For some studies, that's OK, because the research doesn't depend on a representative sample. For other studies, researchers can approximate U.S. population demographics. When a user joins Rally, they can optionally provide demographic information. Researchers can then use the demographics with reweighting, matching, subsampling, and similar methods to approximate a representative population. Those methods already appear throughout social science; whether they're sufficient also depends on the study. > 2. To compensate for the voluntary nature of the studies, do you think researchers in general will still be incentivized to find data sources that are less respectful of people's privacy and don't require an opt-in to the study? Rally is designed to provide a new research capability that didn't exist before. I don't expect a substitution effect like that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jonathanmayer 5y ago
Princeton research collaborator here. Glad to answer questions about Rally. > What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else? That depends on the Rally study, since research questions differ and studies are required to practice data minimization. Each study is opt in, with both short-form and long-form explanations. Academic studies also involve IRB-approved informed consent. Take a look at our launch study for an example [1]. > Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here. The motivation is enabling crowdsourced scientific research that benefits society. Think Apple Research [2], NYU Ad Observatory [3], or The Markup's Citizen Browser [4]. There are many research questions at the intersection of technology and society where conventional methods like web crawls, surveys, and social media feeds aren't sufficient. That's especially true for platform accountability research; the major platforms have generally refused to facilitate independent research that might identify problems, and platform problems often involve targeting and personalization that other methods can't meaningfully examine. [1] https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covid-19-news/index.html https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covi... [2] https://www.apple.com/ios/research-app/ https://www.apple.com/ios/research-app/ [3] https://adobservatory.org/ https://adobservatory.org/ [4] https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser
- thombles 5y ago
  These "This Study Will Collect" and "How We Protect You" sections are really good. It probably wouldn't convince me personally to sign up, but it's as comprehensive as I would expect. It's a shame that these comments didn't make it into the blog post.
- chobytes 5y ago
  Personally I don't think that researchers have any more business doing this kind of surveillance than Google and company do. The idea that this will benefit society seems naive to me. I feel like it will only serve to legitimize the practice by putting ostensibly trustworthy faces on the packaging.
  - splistud 5y ago
DavideNL 5y ago
The answers seem explained quite clearly and are simple to find by just clicking the links in the article… “what data”,for example: https://rally.mozilla.org/privacy-policy/ https://rally.mozilla.org/privacy-policy/
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
Mozilla strikes me as an organisation with too many resources for its own good. They keep pursuing these random side gigs with limited unifying theme other than an excuse to spend money.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Reminder that donations to Mozilla are not donations to Firefox development. The Mozilla Corp (makes Firefox) and Mozilla Foundation (gets donations) are mostly separate.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  Additional reminder that Mozilla just recently had to go through a round of layoffs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
  - errantmind 5y ago
    The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed?
    - Nicksil 5y ago
      >The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed? I sometimes have the same reaction when learning the number of people employed for what I would have otherwise thought to be some meager thing. Then I get reminded about the folks over in external/internal support; marketing; design; IT/infrastructure; legal; compliance; etc. Here's Mozilla's listing: https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/
      - errantmind 5y ago
elliekelly 5y ago
> privacy-preserving data collection system I hate this. Viscerally. Why, why, WHY does every “privacy first” system, platform, whatever, start with the presumption that some people should get your data and it’s just a matter of vetting the “good” groups from the “bad” groups. No. That isn’t privacy. No one should get my data. And it’s ridiculous that all of these companies try to position their data grabbing projects as “privacy” oriented when what they really mean is they’re not quite as invasive and/or are slightly more transparent about their data theft compared to others. </rant>
- jefftk 5y ago
  Rally is entirely opt-in, so I think you're off the mark here?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  > start with the presumption that some people should get your data Some people do want others to have their data. Dropbox is a great example of a successful business that is built on the idea of sharing data.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Yes, I want to use Dropbox to share my invoice with my client and my client to share the assets from their designer with me. I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch. These are two VERY different definitions of "data", mingling the two is not helpful to discourse.
    - Nicksil 5y ago
      >I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch. This whole thing is opt-in, is it not? If you don't want to share your information, you simply do not opt-in.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
> Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. It does appear that this piece was written by Mozilla, themselves… on their own blog.
- xpe 5y ago
  >> Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. > It does appear that this piece was written by Mozilla, themselves… on their own blog. Haha! Captain Obvious strikes again. Joking aside, I think the other commenter knew the post was written by someone at Mozilla on the Mozilla web site. Their point, I think, was that the author didn't do a good job of selling Rally.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Heh, nice one. Could be, yeah. My estimation is that Mozilla was making a desperately concerted effort to signal that they are not at fault in the Big Tech wars.
throwaway81523 5y ago
Yep. "Privacy first" and "data sharing" don't belong in the same sentence.
joshspankit 5y ago
I was really excited for most of the time reading thinking “A privacy-first general data store that lets us donate insights for the common good, and may even end up being a marketplace where we can choose to sell data. This is so cool! I hope they have a mobile app so I can record things like what I ate for supper or how long I looked at a screen today” But, it seems like they’re just tracking browser behaviour, and there’s absolutely zero place for people to add their own data? Why bother giving it a branded name then? Why not “crowd-sourced browser behaviour study in partnership with ____”?

grumblenum 5y ago

I read it as "we're protecting your privacy by increasing the number of people who can monitor your activity on our browser." Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. I'm starting to see a theme of papering over their technology products with a lot of modern art and hyperbolic language. "Computer scientists, social scientists and other researchers will be able to launch groundbreaking studies about the web and invite you to participate." Wow. I'm about to make history with a browser add-on! "Our first study is “Political and COVID-19 News” and comes from the Princeton team that helped us develop the Rally research initiative." Groundbreaking! College students can now make sure that I am adequately fact-checked if I err from the path of truth.

dhimes 5y ago
College students can now make sure that I am adequately fact-checked if I err from the path of truth. I don't think they are "making sure" as in "enforcing." It sounds like they are observing and reporting, hopefully in an aggregated fashion.
jonathanmayer 5y ago
> Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. Nope. This is an important point: the type of crowdsourced science that Rally enables is something that researchers couldn't do before. (With the exception of a very small number of teams who made massive investments in building single-purpose crowdsourcing infrastructure from the ground up.)
- ysavir 5y ago
  Could you provide more detail on what makes it novel?
  - jonathanmayer 5y ago
    Common research methods have significant limitations. Web crawls, for instance, usually don't realistically simulate user activity and experiences. Lab studies often involve simplified systems that don't generalize to the real world. Surveys yield self-reported data, which can be very unreliable. Rally studies, by contrast, reflect real-world user activity and experiences. In science jargon, Rally enables field studies and intervention experiments with excellent ecological validity.
    - ysavir 5y ago
      Thanks for clarifying! Makes sense. A few follow up questions: 1. Do you expect the opt-in nature of these studies to impact their findings? 2. To compensate for the voluntary nature of the studies, do you think researchers in general will still be incentivized to find data sources that are less respectful of people's privacy and don't require an opt-in to the study?
      - jonathanmayer 5y ago
        > 1. Do you expect the opt-in nature of these studies to impact their findings? The Rally participant population is not representative of the U.S. population—these are users who run Firefox (other browsers coming soon), choose to join Rally, and choose to join a study. In research jargon, there's significant sampling bias. For some studies, that's OK, because the research doesn't depend on a representative sample. For other studies, researchers can approximate U.S. population demographics. When a user joins Rally, they can optionally provide demographic information. Researchers can then use the demographics with reweighting, matching, subsampling, and similar methods to approximate a representative population. Those methods already appear throughout social science; whether they're sufficient also depends on the study. > 2. To compensate for the voluntary nature of the studies, do you think researchers in general will still be incentivized to find data sources that are less respectful of people's privacy and don't require an opt-in to the study? Rally is designed to provide a new research capability that didn't exist before. I don't expect a substitution effect like that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jonathanmayer 5y ago

Princeton research collaborator here. Glad to answer questions about Rally. > What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else? That depends on the Rally study, since research questions differ and studies are required to practice data minimization. Each study is opt in, with both short-form and long-form explanations. Academic studies also involve IRB-approved informed consent. Take a look at our launch study for an example [1]. > Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here. The motivation is enabling crowdsourced scientific research that benefits society. Think Apple Research [2], NYU Ad Observatory [3], or The Markup's Citizen Browser [4]. There are many research questions at the intersection of technology and society where conventional methods like web crawls, surveys, and social media feeds aren't sufficient. That's especially true for platform accountability research; the major platforms have generally refused to facilitate independent research that might identify problems, and platform problems often involve targeting and personalization that other methods can't meaningfully examine. [1] https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covid-19-news/index.html https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covi... [2] https://www.apple.com/ios/research-app/ https://www.apple.com/ios/research-app/ [3] https://adobservatory.org/ https://adobservatory.org/ [4] https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser

thombles 5y ago
These "This Study Will Collect" and "How We Protect You" sections are really good. It probably wouldn't convince me personally to sign up, but it's as comprehensive as I would expect. It's a shame that these comments didn't make it into the blog post.
chobytes 5y ago
Personally I don't think that researchers have any more business doing this kind of surveillance than Google and company do. The idea that this will benefit society seems naive to me. I feel like it will only serve to legitimize the practice by putting ostensibly trustworthy faces on the packaging.
- splistud 5y ago

DavideNL 5y ago

The answers seem explained quite clearly and are simple to find by just clicking the links in the article… “what data”,for example: https://rally.mozilla.org/privacy-policy/ https://rally.mozilla.org/privacy-policy/

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

Mozilla strikes me as an organisation with too many resources for its own good. They keep pursuing these random side gigs with limited unifying theme other than an excuse to spend money.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Reminder that donations to Mozilla are not donations to Firefox development. The Mozilla Corp (makes Firefox) and Mozilla Foundation (gets donations) are mostly separate.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
Additional reminder that Mozilla just recently had to go through a round of layoffs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
- errantmind 5y ago
  The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed?
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    >The fact they have significantly more than 250 employees in the first place is a bit mind boggling. As far as I can tell most of the spending is unrelated to Firefox. What do all of these people do and why are they needed? I sometimes have the same reaction when learning the number of people employed for what I would have otherwise thought to be some meager thing. Then I get reminded about the folks over in external/internal support; marketing; design; IT/infrastructure; legal; compliance; etc. Here's Mozilla's listing: https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/
    - errantmind 5y ago

elliekelly 5y ago

> privacy-preserving data collection system I hate this. Viscerally. Why, why, WHY does every “privacy first” system, platform, whatever, start with the presumption that some people should get your data and it’s just a matter of vetting the “good” groups from the “bad” groups. No. That isn’t privacy. No one should get my data. And it’s ridiculous that all of these companies try to position their data grabbing projects as “privacy” oriented when what they really mean is they’re not quite as invasive and/or are slightly more transparent about their data theft compared to others. </rant>

jefftk 5y ago
Rally is entirely opt-in, so I think you're off the mark here?
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
> start with the presumption that some people should get your data Some people do want others to have their data. Dropbox is a great example of a successful business that is built on the idea of sharing data.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Yes, I want to use Dropbox to share my invoice with my client and my client to share the assets from their designer with me. I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch. These are two VERY different definitions of "data", mingling the two is not helpful to discourse.
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    >I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch. This whole thing is opt-in, is it not? If you don't want to share your information, you simply do not opt-in.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago

> Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. It does appear that this piece was written by Mozilla, themselves… on their own blog.

xpe 5y ago
>> Whoever wrote this piece is way too close to... whatever it is Mozilla is doing here. > It does appear that this piece was written by Mozilla, themselves… on their own blog. Haha! Captain Obvious strikes again. Joking aside, I think the other commenter knew the post was written by someone at Mozilla on the Mozilla web site. Their point, I think, was that the author didn't do a good job of selling Rally.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  Heh, nice one. Could be, yeah. My estimation is that Mozilla was making a desperately concerted effort to signal that they are not at fault in the Big Tech wars.

throwaway81523 5y ago

Yep. "Privacy first" and "data sharing" don't belong in the same sentence.

joshspankit 5y ago

I was really excited for most of the time reading thinking “A privacy-first general data store that lets us donate insights for the common good, and may even end up being a marketplace where we can choose to sell data. This is so cool! I hope they have a mobile app so I can record things like what I ate for supper or how long I looked at a screen today” But, it seems like they’re just tracking browser behaviour, and there’s absolutely zero place for people to add their own data? Why bother giving it a branded name then? Why not “crowd-sourced browser behaviour study in partnership with ____”?