The company promises it won’t affect user privacy

Aug 23, 2017 09:18 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla plans to start collecting more browsing data from Firefox users, as it seeks more relevant information that would help the company improve the browser.

In an announcement posted on the Mozilla Governance group, Georg Fritzsche explains that the current proposal is to make the data collection an opt-out feature, which means that it could be enabled by default and users who do not agree with sharing more information with the company would have to manually disable it.

Fritzsche explains that such a data collection feature would help collect “unbiased” information to improve Firefox, including top sites that users are visiting and websites with Flash content.

Differential privacy

Mozilla wants to use differential privacy and guarantees that everything would be collected anonymously, so even if Firefox users agree with sharing information with the company, privacy would be fully protected.

“The Google Open Source project called RAPPOR is the most widely known and deployed implementation of differential privacy. We have been investigating the use of RAPPOR for these kind of use-cases, with initial simulation results being promising,” Mozilla’s engineer explains.

The company is now planning to launch a study to see how the whole thing would work, and says that it needs users’ feedback because making this an opt-out feature for everyone.

“What we plan to do now is run an opt-out SHIELD study to validate our implementation of RAPPOR. This study will collect the value for users’ home page (eTLD+1) for a randomly selected group of our release population. We are hoping to launch this in mid-September. This is not the type of data we have collected as opt-out in the past and is a new approach for Mozilla. As such, we are still experimenting with the project and wanted to reach out for feedback,” Fritzsche continued.

Differential privacy is already being used by a number of companies to improve their products, including Google, which implemented this approach for Chrome browser.