14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla takes another swing at protecting people’s privacy on the Internet with the help of a new strategic initiative called Polaris. This is an initiative that seeks to put together the company’s privacy efforts along with other leaders in the industry.
For the launch, Mozilla is collaborating with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), but also with the TOR Project, both non-profits. They’ll both support and advise Polaris projects and help Mozilla align them with policy goals.
“CDT looks forward to working with Mozilla on the Polaris program and advising on issues like combating Internet censorship and protecting online anonymity, which are vital to promoting free expression online,” said Justin Brookman of CDT.
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The Tor Project’s Andrew Lewman also expressed their excitement to joining Mozilla as a launch partner in the Polaris program and said they looked forward to working together on privacy technology, open standards, as well as future product collaborations.
Polaris is kicking off with two new experiments. The first one builds on the Tor Browser, the easy implementation of the anonymizing technology for web surfing. Since the project is already based on the Firefox code, Mozilla is evaluating what the Tor Project has done in order to see just how it can make Firefox even more Tor-friendly.
Mozilla will also start boosting its own high-capacity Tor middle relays to make Tor’s network more responsive and allow Tor to serve more users. Middle relays are safe to run from a legal standpoint because they can’t be mistaken as the traffic source if someone uses Tor for something illegal.
Tor is getting more and more traction in recent months, especially following the push for more privacy in the aftermath of the NSA scandal. Just recently, Facebook decided to launch a hidden service link for Tor users.
Mozilla is also running an “in-product Polaris” experiment that seeks to create a way for users to escape tracking, even though the Do Not Track effort has failed miserably.
“The second experiment (which is our first in-product Polaris experiment) seeks to understand how we can offer a feature that protects those users that want to be free from invasive tracking without penalizing advertisers and content sites that respect a user’s preferences,” writes the company’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief of Mozilla’s global business development, public policy and legal teams.
The privacy tool is being tested on the “Nightly” channel and while it all looks promising, it’s not ready for the limelight just yet.
