Read when you’ve got time to spare.
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There’s a whole sub-genre of doomscrolling devoted to how Big Tech uses data in unsettling and nefarious ways. So much so that it can be tempting to all but eliminate your digital footprint, or shrug and accept that “you are the product.”
Our colleagues at Mozilla Rally offer a more appealing middle ground: The opportunity to become an active participant in how your data is used. By allowing people to donate their data to highly-vetted research studies, Rally works to build a better internet and fight back against exploitative tech. As they put it, “It’s a big issue that matters to all and that means we can all help.”
Here, their team shares a collection of articles that show the multiple impacts of lack of research and data access—examples of the type of fuzzy data security that fuels their mission.
Image by wenmei Zhou/Getty Images
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Rebecca Weiss: “Transparency also means some form of independence—we can’t change what we don’t know. And previous attempts at transparency from platforms highlight how little independence we have.”
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Sydette Harry: “Some of my main concerns about how data is used are structural, the actual architecture of it. If tracking or inhibiting tracking can interrupt accessibility how embedded is it in everything they make and how does it affect users.”
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Javaun Maraudi: “In the face of a new consensus — we don’t know what social media is doing to us as a society — Casey Newton suggests Facebook should boldly embrace transparency.”
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SH: “What happens when users notice a problem and lack data and platform interest. It’s not always a fight against Facebook, more often it’s a fight to save, protect communities and families. Lack of transparency prohibits your best most concerned users.”
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SH: “Too much of the discussion pretends that this is only around the election but this has been a known problem for now nearly a decade, how much data has already been lost that could help us make better connections.”
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SH: “When what you see on your feed can affect the very fabric of democracy and the radicalization of teens. ‘Trust us’ isn’t a very good oversight, but for most social platforms, that’s all we have.”
BONUS READ: US Tech Needs to Do a Great Deal Better When It Comes to Democracy via Financial Times
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Ted Han: “So we saw what life was like without Facebook for six hours when it went down on October 5th. Here’s a series from Kash Hill when she tried cutting each of the major tech giants out of her life.”
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Exploitative tech is complex and complicated. To develop effective tools, policies, and resources that make a difference, we need to ground our work in airtight research. That’s where studies come in.
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Rebecca Weiss, Sydette Harry, Javaun Moradi, and Ted Han are part of the Rally team within Mozilla. Rally enables people to contribute, gain insight and value from their own data. Today, people can donate their data through browser extensions to public interest studies that explore big societal problems that start on the Internet. Rally’s first researchers are studying how misinformation flows, social media platform transparency, and local news sustainability, with more to come.