I’ve read the comments to my last post a number of times and I think I now understand what’s happening.
There are a bunch of comments along the lines of “if Firefox starts to include something that tracks my behavior and automatically sends that information off to someone else, then I don’t want to use it anymore.” Absolutely. I don’t want to use that kind of product either. That’s why I’m part of Mozilla — to build products that don’t do this sort of thing. To be explicit: Firefox and Mozilla will remain intensely focused on privacy, protection of personal data and user control over that data. The Mozilla community won’t build or support products that do otherwise.
There are also some comments that discount the examples I used because they are “server-side.” Yes. Absolutely. The examples are server-side because that’s what I mean.
The kind of data I’m trying to talk about is more like census-data: how many people are using the Internet; what are the broad patterns of Internet development and usage. In our physical lives, the basic demographics of our population collected in a census are a valuable shared resource. In understanding the Internet aggregate, anonymized, server-side census-like data can also be a valuable public resource.
This kind of data can of course remain a private resource, held by those websites big enough to generate their own understanding. My point is that moving some of this census-like data from the private to the public realm could have great benefits.
I’m wondering if this distinction, which is so clear in my mind, has not been clear in my writing. The term “usage data” may have made this worse. I explicitly do not mean using the browser to collect individual usage data. I mean looking at broad usage patterns that can be discerned from aggregated, server-side data, such as the examples I gave before.