W3C Takes over Development of Firefox Privacy Extension

The W3C has taken over development and hosting responsibilities for the Privacy Dashboard Firefox extension, a project funded through the European Union's 7th Framework Programme.

The Privacy Dashboard extension aims to inform users about the personal information collected by websites and allows them to control what they want to share.

The add-on relies on a database containing information about the privacy policies and practices of the top 1,000 websites in the world.

An icon is placed on the toolbar and it changes state depending on the accessed website. There are three states that indicate if the site is known to be privacy-friendly, if it collects some information, but doesn't display a clear privacy policy, and if it allows third-parties to track you.

Websites that are not known to be safe trigger a prompt asking the user to make a decision on their own about what information they want to share. There are three options: always accept, protect me and tell me more.

The "tell me more" option provides users with a list of session cookies, invisible images, third-party content and other items. The user can then make a decision to be carefree, thoughtful or paranoid about the site.

Users can also help the project by submitting anonymous information about the sites they visit, like the cookies they set, etc. This helps the database grow, but the W3C is also looking for volunteers to gather non-standard information.

This job involves "tracking the privacy practices of websites over time and helping to present this information. This will include tracking changes to site privacy policies as the Dashboard can't do so by itself," the organization explains. Volunteer developers and translators are also welcome to join the project.

The Privacy Dashboard extension can be installed from here.