Mozilla Rally Emerges As A Novel Privacy-Centric Internet Data Sharing Platform

The primary concern one would have with Mozilla Rally is privacy, but as Mozilla states, it is “Built for the browser with privacy and transparency at its core,” allowing users to control and contribute any browsing data they generate. If this manages to take off, the crowdsourced data will be used to “help understand some of the biggest problems of the internet and make it better,” as Rally Project Lead Rebecca Weiss explains.
Rather than having your data go to private companies, it will be used for academic research projects, the first of which is about “Political and COVID-19 news,” in partnership with Princeton University. Soon after, a second academic study with be added to Rally, called “Beyond the Paywall,” from researchers at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. This second study aims to “better understand news consumption, what people value in news and the economics that could build a more sustainable ecosystem for newspapers in the online marketplace.”

If this sort of research sounds valuable to you, you can participate in Rally at rally.mozilla.org through Firefox, so long as you are 19 years of age or older. If data points are collected from you at the end of the day, they should at least go to a beneficial place. On the other hand, data collection is still data collection, but let us know what you think of this initiative either way in the comments below.