The Mozilla Foundation has built a browser-based platform called Rally that lets Firefox users contribute their browsing data to university researchers.
The first study, conducted by Princeton researchers, concerns COVID-19 news articles and misinformation. The researchers will study how often Rally users come in contact with stories from a list of known purveyors of misinformation, and record how much they share or like the articles on social media. Other studies, which are focused on understanding and finding solutions for social problems caused by the data economy, will follow.
“Online services constantly experiment on users, to maximize engagement and profit,” says Princeton researcher Jonathan Mayer. “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.”
Mozilla is doing something similar to what Markup did with its Citizen Browser Project….
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Source : fastcompany.com
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