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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

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.
        5y ago
- grumblenum 5y ago
  Princeton can't buy data from aggregators? Wikipedia says they have a $26.6B endowment.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

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.
      - 5y ago
grumblenum 5y ago
Princeton can't buy data from aggregators? Wikipedia says they have a $26.6B endowment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]