Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 201 posts

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

#81

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

WA wrote: post #4

Surprisingly difficult to understand what this thing is or does. Seems like you can "donate" your browsing behavior to science for doing studies in a kinda anonymous privacy protecting way.

> Surprisingly difficult to understand what this thing is or does.

Social science is a hard science, in the sense that it is very difficult to comprehend the technical details without adequate training.

> Seems like you can “donate” your browsing behavior to science

More than that, you can donate the following, as well:

> Your Rally demographics and an optional short survey

For the COVID study, for example.

https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covi...

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

#82

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

kevincox wrote: post #8
WA wrote: post #4

Surprisingly difficult to understand what this thing is or does. Seems like you can "donate" your browsing behavior to science for doing studies in a kinda anonymous privacy protecting way.

It doesn't even sound anonymous. It sounds like they just audit that the partner aggregates the data once delivered to them. Some sort of pinky-promise.

> Some sort of pinky-promise.

Nope.

> * research partners are contractually obligated to abide by these procedures and protect your data.*

https://rally.mozilla.org/how-rally-works/faqs/

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

#83

Post by splistud »

chobytes wrote: post #69
jonathanmayer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Princeton research collaborator here. Glad to answer questions about Rally. > What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else? That depends on the Rally study, since research questions differ and studies are required to practice data minimization. Each study is opt in, with both short-form and long-form explanations. Academic studies also involve IRB-approved informed consent. Take a look at our launch study…

Personally I don't think that researchers have any more business doing this kind of surveillance than Google and company do. The idea that this will benefit society seems naive to me. I feel like it will only serve to legitimize the practice by putting ostensibly trustworthy faces on the packaging.

Not just surveillance, but conducting research within corporate platforms. Therefore, they would have access to my data and a corporation's engine. If I think that google knows too much about me, do I get to opt-in whether that hyper-knowledge is shared to researchers (because I won't).

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

#84

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

nebulous1 wrote: post #9
WA wrote: post #4

Surprisingly difficult to understand what this thing is or does. Seems like you can "donate" your browsing behavior to science for doing studies in a kinda anonymous privacy protecting way.

I agree. I haven't read beyond the linked page but my take is that it doesn't do anything about the data that you're already "sharing", but provides an additional mechanism for you to share data with specific parties in a controlled manner. All this seems reasonable if that's the case, but the page is misselling it.

> I haven't read beyond the linked page

Then you haven’t yet properly informed yourself.

> All this seems reasonable if that's the case, but the page is misselling it.

There are limits to how much info you can fit into one page. Marketing pages are built in such a way that they guide you to where the detailed pages are.

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

#85

Post by FlyingLawnmower »

jonathanmayer wrote: post #39
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 academi…

Have you thought about using central/global differential privacy (which tends to have much less noise) on the "high level aggregates" or "aggregated datasets" that persist after the research study ends?

E.g. from the FAQ: "We do intend to release aggregated data sets in the public good to foster an open web. When we do this, we will remove your personal information and try to disclose it in a way that minimizes the risk of you being re-identified."

It's a little worrying to think that this disclosure process might be done with no formal privacy protection. See the Netflix competition, AOL search dataset, Public Transportation in Victoria, etc. case studies of how non-formal attempts at anonymization can fail users.

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

#86

Post by skybrian »

jonathanmayer wrote: post #79
skybrian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I can see that RAPPOR seems to be deprecated in favor of something else called ukm (Url-keyed metrics) but not why this change is being made. Is there somewhere I can read more about it?

I am not aware of any public announcement or explanation. Which is... probably intentional, since Google is removing a headline privacy feature from Chrome.

How did you learn about it? By studying the code?

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

#87

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #76

Whenever someone says they want to study anything relating to "misinformation", it's almost a guarantee they're looking to solve human problems with technical solutions. Oh look: "Rally has the potential to help address societal problems we could not solve before." No, I don't think it does. Especially when the first thing you tout is a study on "misinformation about COVID". The fact that American's are locked in a b…

> We have to break away from this stupid idea that if only we studied what was happening on Twitter and Facebook we could fix our problems.

Analogously, to demonstrate absurdity, consider this statement: we have to break away from this stupid idea that if we studied what was happening on our crop fields and our roads we could fix our problems with agriculture and traffic.

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

#88

Post by Ensorceled »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #66
elliekelly wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> privacy-preserving data collection system I hate this. Viscerally. Why, why, WHY does every “privacy first” system, platform, whatever, start with the presumption that some people should get your data and it’s just a matter of vetting the “good” groups from the “bad” groups. No. That isn’t privacy. No one should get my data. And it’s ridiculous that all of these companies try to position their data grabbing project…

> start with the presumption that some people should get your data Some people do want others to have their data. Dropbox is a great example of a successful business that is built on the idea of sharing data.

Yes, I want to use Dropbox to share my invoice with my client and my client to share the assets from their designer with me.

I don't want anybody tracking what websites I visit, articles I read or facebook videos I watch.

These are two VERY different definitions of "data", mingling the two is not helpful to discourse.

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

#89

Post by Ensorceled »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #82
kevincox wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even sound anonymous. It sounds like they just audit that the partner aggregates the data once delivered to them. Some sort of pinky-promise.

> Some sort of pinky-promise. Nope. > * research partners are contractually obligated to abide by these procedures and protect your data.* https://rally.mozilla.org/how-rally-works/faqs/

Lots of abuses of data are "contractually" forbidden.

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

#90

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

lucideer wrote: post #80
jonathanmayer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Princeton research collaborator here. Glad to answer questions about Rally. > What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else? That depends on the Rally study, since research questions differ and studies are required to practice data minimization. Each study is opt in, with both short-form and long-form explanations. Academic studies also involve IRB-approved informed consent. Take a look at our launch study…

I know you mean well but I think you completely missed the above commenters point. You've replied here with answers to address their (our?) potential concerns, but the commenter never said they had concerns about the project itself, rather that this particular blog post doesn't "sell" or explain the value add well. That's feedback on the project's communication strategy, not on what it's actually doing. > > Why? What…

> You seem to be confusing "theys". The question is what motivates participants, not what motivates researchers.

Contrarily, you seem to be confusing “theys”, yourself.

There exist participants that are motivated by participating in research that benefits society.

Just like there exist individuals motivated by lending their computing resources to the various @Home research efforts.

Post reply on HN