Privacy/Roadmap/2014

Tracking Roadmap for 2014

Background

Tracking is any technique that can be used to accumulate history (purchases, browsing, messaging) and associate it with a particular person. There are many reasons for organizations to engage in tracking, including behavioral advertising, customized content, conversions, and government surveillance. Many of these reasons are legitimate -- in fact advertising revenue subsidizes almost all free web content. However, a combination of industry and government forces have aligned in a way to incentivize silent, invisible wholesale data collection of personal information. Because typical users don't recognize when or how data collection happens, it essentially takes place without user consent.

In 2013, Edward Snowden's revelations showed that industry and government tracking are intertwined. Although everyone knew this was possible, the Snowden revelation was the first case of documented misuse of advertising tracking for another purpose. This misuse has devastating impact on our economy, reducing trust worldwide in the mechanisms that enable free access to information, freedom of expression, and commerce.

In this roadmap we focus on three major sources of tracking:

• Tracking for the purposes of advertising
• Tracking via social widgets, such as the Facebook "Like" button, the Twitter retweet button, or the Google +1 button
• Tracking via physical devices such as mobile phones.

Goal: Firefox users know when they are being tracked

Lightbeam is a Firefox addon that enables users to visualize network connections. Lightbeam already does a good job at showing users their network connections. We want to make Lightbeam even more powerful by translating this information into a human-understandable format: who is tracking you, and what can you do about it? The Lightbeam roadmap discusses improvements to visualization, including per-tab visualization and automatically identifying tracking domains.

Goal: Firefox users can avoid being tracked

In Lightbeam, once we have the ability to automatically identify tracking domains, we can offer people the option to disallow network connections to those domains. This work is tracked in the Lightbeam roadmap.

Lightbeam currently has 500K active daily installations. We eventually want to make Lightbeam features available to all Firefox users. Experiments in Lightbeam will serve as a valuable testing ground for determining the best user experience for tracking protection. Although Firefox already supports DoNotTrack, the DNT is not enforceable on the client side. With our learnings from Lightbeam, we can port the most useful tracking protection features to Firefox to make DNT "with teeth" available to more people.

• Reducing traffic from social widgets
• Reducing physical tracking on mobile devices

Goal: Mozilla transforms the tracking ecosystem

Talk about shared lightbeam data.

Goal: Firefox users can be who they want, when they want

Move to future plans wiki

• Multiple profiles in FF Sync
• The right to be forgotten