[$] Mozilla Rally: trading privacy for the "public good"
A new project from Mozilla, which is meant to help researchers collect
browsing data, but only with the informed consent of the browser-user, is taking a lot of
heat, perhaps in part because the company can never seem to do anything
right, at least in the
eyes of some. Mozilla Rally was
announced
on June 25 as joint venture between the company and researchers at
Princeton University "to enable crowdsourced science for public
good". The idea is that users can volunteer to give academic studies access to
the same kinds of browser data that is being tracked in some browsers
today. Whether the privacy safeguards are strong
enough—and if there is sufficient reason for users to sign up—remains to be seen.