14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has always been more than Firefox, but the organization is about to spread out even more this year. Mozilla is working on several things that should make the web better for users, but they are not strictly related to Firefox.
What's more, they mean that the organization will be venturing into new things, new things that come with new problems, user privacy being one of them.
Mozilla is working on an authentication and identity system, an app store and even a new mobile operating system. All of these will need to access and store a lot more user data than Mozilla's current products and services.
As such, Mozilla is working on ways it can ensure that user data stays safe and private, both from a technical point of view but also from a policy point of view.
"To offer these services, we’ll need to store user data on Mozilla servers at a much larger scale than we have to date. This requires great care and deliberation. We’ve started the process of figuring out how to do this and tried a few pilot evaluations," Ben Adida, who leads Identity, i.e. BrowserID, at Mozilla, wrote.
Mozilla already stores some user data in the cloud, via Firefox Sync. However, since that data is only useful in the browser, it is encrypted at the app level, meaning that only the user can 'read' it, Mozilla has no way to know what's inside even if it has actual access to the files.
This approach won't work for the new services and products Mozilla is branching into. So it needs to figure out how to keep data safe while also making use of it for the benefit of users.
It has already laid out several design guidelines which define how, why and when a feature should require access to user data. It is only acceptable to ask for data if it benefits the users directly, Mozilla believes.
Likewise, all data collected needs to be kept track of and the reasons why it is collected understood. Whenever possible, data should not leave a user's computer, phone or tablet. The data that is stored should be saved for the shortest amount of time required.
But these are just broad guidelines; in order to ensure the future products follow these principles, Mozilla has assembled a team dubbed Mozilla Data Safety Team that will work on making sure data stays safe.
In a world where more and more companies have access and make use of more and more of your data, not always for your benefit and sometimes to the contrary, there needs to be someone like Mozilla, with less interest in profiting from the user data, to offer an alternative.