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Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#31

Post by jonathanmayer »

Yaina wrote: post #16

It's not easy to understand, especially from the blog post alone, but as far as I understand it, the proposition is the following: Big companies have the ability to do research on users all the time, either by doing anonymous studies or by tracking you for their ad networks. This is a luxury many researchers that work outside of these big tech companies don't have, which creates a scientific power imbalance. Mozilla…

> This is a luxury many researchers that work outside of these big tech companies don't have, which creates a scientific power imbalance.

The power imbalance goes far beyond science. Independent research is foundational for platform accountability. An example: when I was working on the Senate staff, before I started teaching at Princeton, a recurring challenge was the lack of rigorous independent research on platform problems. We were mostly compelled to rely on anecdotes, which made oversight and building a factual record for legislation difficult.

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#32

Post by ysavir »

jonathanmayer wrote: post #27
grumblenum wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as "we're protecting your privacy by increasing the number of people who can monitor your activity on our browser." Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. I'm starting to see a theme of papering over their technology products with a lot of modern art and hyperbolic language. "Computer scientists, soc…

> Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. Nope. This is an important point: the type of crowdsourced science that Rally enables is something that researchers couldn't do before. (With the exception of a very small number of teams who made massive investments in building single-purpose crowdsourcing infrastructu…

Could you provide more detail on what makes it novel?

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#34

Post by gopiandcode »

Looking through the FAQ, It seems like Rally requires users to send their raw data straight to the aggregation service, with the only privacy guarantees being that the data is encrypted during transport, and a "promise" that they will run internal audits to make sure private data isn't released from their servers.

IMO this seems to provide worse privacy than even Google and Micro$oft's telemetry, which at least use differential privacy to make sure that each individual's privacy is somewhat protected (the data you send is randomised so even if the aggregator is compromised by a malicious third party (e.g. NSA) individuals have some degree of plausible deniability).

Sure, Mozilla's intentions may be more "pure" (or is that just their propaganda speaking?), but in terms of privacy guarantees this seems like it is a strict downgrade, that abuses their goodwill to hide its deficiencies.

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#35

Post by jonathanmayer »

ysavir wrote: post #32
jonathanmayer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably, the users will be well-endowed and tax-advantaged institutions who could have just bought the information from data-aggregators anyway. Nope. This is an important point: the type of crowdsourced science that Rally enables is something that researchers couldn't do before. (With the exception of a very small number of teams who made massive investments in building single-purpose crowdsourcing infrastructu…

Could you provide more detail on what makes it novel?

Common research methods have significant limitations. Web crawls, for instance, usually don't realistically simulate user activity and experiences. Lab studies often involve simplified systems that don't generalize to the real world. Surveys yield self-reported data, which can be very unreliable.

Rally studies, by contrast, reflect real-world user activity and experiences. In science jargon, Rally enables field studies and intervention experiments with excellent ecological validity.

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#37

Post by eitland »

For any Mozilla people here:

How do you feel that this is prioritized and the Tab Strip API is not? (Edit, this issue:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447)

My background: I'm a "loyal" user, but not because of love anymore but because the alternatives are even worse in my opinion.

I have given up Mozilla the non-profit the last few years but will continue to use Firefox because of ergonomics and politics for now.

If someone can convince me Pale Moon is safe enough to use at work I'd switch in a heartbeat though. Same if someone starts maintaining a paid (or unpaid) fork of the latest Firefox that actually reimplements the Tab Strip API for web extensions and starts reimplementing the rest of the missing APIs.

(If this triggers an idea in a brilliant hacker here then create a kickstarter and mail me about it: I'm easily in on $10 a month, maybe more. I'm looking for a work browser that won't depend on Chromium when Google finally decides it is time to kill the extension API on desktop as well.)

PS: Even though I have given up Mozilla I'm still looking for a way to help fund Firefox as long as I know it is used for Firefox and not for running it into the ground.

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#38

Post by yyyk »

This is exactly the data a modern Cambridge Analytica would want (e.g. shares, time spent on each post, all correlated to demographics). I hope this platform has controls to ensure that study data isn't misused post-study for non-study purposes, because the FAQ answer isn't so encouraging[0].

[0] https://rally.mozilla.org/how-rally-works/faqs/#what-happens...

"With Mozilla’s permission, researchers may retain aggregated or de-identified datasets for their analyses. Mozilla may also retain aggregated data sets which we may release in the public good to foster an open web."

Shouldn't you ask the users for permission on using their aggregate data for purposes that could be different to the study they enrolled to?

Re: Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

#39

Post by jonathanmayer »

gopiandcode wrote: post #34

Looking through the FAQ, It seems like Rally requires users to send their raw data straight to the aggregation service, with the only privacy guarantees being that the data is encrypted during transport, and a "promise" that they will run internal audits to make sure private data isn't released from their servers. IMO this seems to provide worse privacy than even Google and Micro$oft's telemetry, which at least use d…

> with the only privacy guarantees being that the data is encrypted during transport, and a "promise" that they will run internal audits to make sure private data isn't released from their servers.

There's much more than that, including: privacy and security review before a study launches, a data minimization requirement, a sandboxed data analysis environment with strict access controls, and IRB oversight for academic studies.

> IMO this seems to provide worse privacy than even Google and Micro$oft's telemetry, which at least use differential privacy to make sure that each individual's privacy is somewhat protected (the data you send is randomised so even if the aggregator is compromised by a malicious third party (e.g. NSA) individuals have some degree of plausible deniability).

The vast majority of Google and Microsoft telemetry does not involve local differential privacy. Google, in fact, has almost entirely removed local differential privacy (RAPPOR) from Chrome telemetry [1].

We've been examining the feasibility of local differential privacy for Rally. The challenge for us—and why local differential privacy has limited deployment—is that the level of noise makes answering most (often all) research questions impossible.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=101690...

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