Mozilla Corp. today announced the launch of Rally, a new platform that allows users to submit their own browsing data to research projects, using a privacy-centric and opt-in approach.

Data is a valuable thing — so valuable that so-called “free services” spend lots of time tracking and collecting vital information on their users to sell to other parties. These parties can be marketers, banks, insurance companies, governments, researchers and others.

Services also use this information to target advertisements, personalize experiences on their sites, sell products and similar. At the same time, users don’t get a lot of say in what information is collected and what’s done with it, and they often don’t get the choice to opt in or out.

“Online services constantly experiment on users, to maximize engagement and profit,” said Jonathan Mayer, a professor with Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. “But for too long, academic researchers have been stymied when trying to experiment on online services. Rally flips the script and enables a new ecosystem of technology policy research.”

Rally was developed in collaboration with Mayer’s research group at Princeton University. With the platform, computer scientists, social scientists and other researchers can create crowdsourced studies about the web that user browser-based data collection that users can then opt in with a click.

That means Rally gives users the tools to understand what data is being seen, provides the rules under which it is being collected, encrypts it end-to-end, anonymizes it so that it cannot be tracked back to them personally, and finally allows them to control when it’s collected.

“Cutting people out of decisions about their data is an inequity that harms individuals, society and the internet. We believe that you should determine who benefits from your data,” said Rebecca Weiss, Rally’s project lead. “We are data optimists and want to change the way the data economy works for both people and day-to-day business.”

The first study that will kickstart Rally’s research initiatives is “Political and COVID-19 News” from the same Princeton team that helped develop the Rally platform. The study will help reveal how COVID-19 misinformation flows through online services and people engage with it through their browsing habits.

As that study gets underway, the Rally platform will launch a second academic study in partnership with the Stanford University Graduate School of Business called “Beyond the Paywall.” It will aim to understand better what people value in news consumption and help build a more sustainable ecosystem for online newspapers.

Rally is a plugin for Firefox desktop users and available in the United States. Mozilla intends to launch it for other browsers and in other countries in the future. Sign-ups are available now on Rally’s website.

Image: Mozilla