The collection user data by technology companies are often considered to be abusive, but for the latter, it is enormously important to improve the user experience and their products. For this reason, many companies engage in these practices without the knowledge of the user or without his explicit consent.
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| credit :mozilla.org |
Known for its commitment to privacy, Mozilla avoids such practices with its products, but the Publisher of Firefox seems to get to a point where he must also collect more data from users of its Web browser. The Foundation has indeed make his intentions known in a discussion on Google groups: "For Firefox, we want to better understand how users use our product to improve their experience", explains Georg Fritzsche, Platform Mozilla Engineer working on the desktop version of Firefox.
"To do this, we plan to do a new study to test how we can collect additional data in a way that respects privacy," he says.
The problem
The problem is that there is a recurring demand of Firefox product teams to have the ability to collect more sensitive data, such as the most visited sites by users or Flash sites that meet the users. These teams also need to know how the features of Firefox work on specific sites. But currently, Firefox can collect this data when the user gives his consent, which does not allow him to have enough data.
In a public discussion, a developer in the Mozilla JavaScript team (with the pseudo Kannanvijayan) tries to better explain the problem, but by talking to his own account. It says that it regularly faces problems caused by the lack of data. "Follow the regressions, crashes and performance problems without a good telemetry on how often this happens and in what context ..." "The problems that might have been solved in a few days, with good information, ultimately take several weeks, time to reproduce the problem with little information," he says. adding that "it's just hard to create a better browser without good information about how it behaves with users."
The solution
The solution proposed by Mozilla is the use of differential privacy. In cryptography, differential privacy is a mechanism which aims to maximize the relevance of the results of a query made to a statistical database while minimizing the risk of identification of the records. Of after George Fritzsche, this will allow Firefox to "collect sensitive data without being able to draw conclusions about individual users, thus preserving their privacy." In addition, "an attacker with access to the data that a single user submits won't able to determine whether or not a specific site was visited by that user."
The most known and deployed implementation of differential confidentiality is the open source project of Google called Report. Mozilla says that it has studied the use of Report for these types of use cases, and the initial simulation results have been promising. Mozilla now plans to do a study (from mid-September) to validate its implementation of Report, on a random sample of Firefox users.
Risks
It will be a compromise as the General mission of Mozilla makes very difficult the collection of detailed data. The Foundation considers indeed that the privacy of the users is paramount. There are two major interests that conflict: the need for better information on how the product is used the users and the need for users to keep their browsing habits confidential.
According to Kannanvijayan, and as Mozilla tried to explain it, it's not about collecting URLs, but only top-level domains + 1 (for example, images.google.com) and related information. "This allows us to know generally on which sites we see problems, hopefully, without compromising the privacy of the user." Moreover, the information associated with the site is the performance data, explains the engineer of the JS team of Mozilla.
"However, we also know from history that benevolent intent is not so important." Organizations change and integrate change, and data collected now with good intention can be used with bad intentions in the future. We must therefore pay attention to any compromise we make in order to ensure that a change of intention in the future does not jeopardize what we have originally guaranteed to the user.
source : Google discussion
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