Hi, for Firefox we want to better understand how people use our product to improve their experience. To do that, we are planning to run a new SHIELD study that tests how we can collect additional data in a privacy preserving way. Check out the details below and send me your thoughts.
The problem. One recurring ask from the Firefox product teams is the ability to collect more sensitive data, like top sites users visit and how features perform on specific sites. Currently we can collect this data when the user opts in, but we don't have a way to collect unbiased data, without explicit consent (opt-out). Asks for sensitive data center most commonly around knowing something in relation to which sites a user visits: - "Which top sites are users visiting?" - "Which sites using Flash does a user encounter?" - "Which sites does a user see heavy Jank on?" In summary most asks are for occurrences of an event X per domain (more specifically eTLD+1 [1], e.g. facebook.com or google.co.uk). The solution. One solution is the use of differential privacy [2] [3], which allows us to collect sensitive data without being able to make conclusions about individual users, thus preserving their privacy. An attacker that has access to the data a single user submits is not able to tell whether a specific site was visited by that user or not. The Google Open Source project called RAPPOR [4] [5] 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. Our plan. What we plan to do now is run an opt-out SHIELD study [6] 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. Georg References: 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy 3: https://robertovitillo.com/2016/07/29/differential-privacy-for-dummies/ 4: https://github.com/google/rappor 5: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981>6: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
