Mozilla has launched a platform that allows users to contribute their browsing data to researchers and scientists, enabling them to study the web and create a “better internet.”
One initiative has been launched with a research group at Princeton University that will examine how people engage with news and misinformation about Covid-19 and politics across online services. Another initiative, in collaboration with Stanford University, will evaluate what people value in the news and how a sustainable ecosystem can be made for online newspapers.
The ‘Rally’ platform aims at “enabling unprecedented studies that hold major online services accountable,” Mozilla said in a statement. “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,” it added.
Rally is currently available for Firefox desktop users in the U.S. who are over the age of 19. Mozilla will make it available for other web browsers in other countries in the future.
Mozilla’s browser, Firefox, is the third-most-popular browser in the world. Popularly known for its privacy-focused features, it recently incorporated blocking web trackers by default to protect the users’ browsing data by keeping it private.
In addition to this, the company also created out a toolkit named WebScience that enables researchers to build standardised browser-based studies on Rally, which will encourage data minimisation.
