The Mozilla team announced the Mozilla Rally platform that puts users in control of their data and allows them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects. Rally is a research initiative, which is developed in collaboration with Professor Jonathan Mayer’s research group at Princeton University. It focuses on enabling unprecedented studies that hold online services accountable.
New tookit: WebScience
Mozilla team also announced a new toolkit, WebScience. It allows researchers to build standardized browser-based studies on Rally. It also encourages data minimization, which is how Rally will respect people who participate. The new toolkit was developed and open-sourced by the team at Princeton and co-maintained with Mozilla.
Mozilla’s new platform is now available for Firefox desktop users over age 19 in the United States. Mozilla also stated that the company is planning to launch Rally for other browsers and countries in the future. Rebecca Weiss, Rally Project Lead of Mozilla said,
“Cutting people out of decisions about their data is an inequity that harms individuals, society and the internet. We believe that you should determine who benefits from your data. We are data optimists and want to change the way the data economy works for both people and day-to-day business. We are excited to see how Rally can help understand some of the biggest problems of the internet and make it better.”