Introduction
About year ago I subscribed to duckduckgo newsletter [1] and from that time I really got hooked up on privacy issues of the modern web
I started to think about social media, search engines and companies that really care about their customers privacy
One of these companies is Mozilla, and even after having Google as default search engine I still think it is one of few corporations that has real impact on privacy battle
Mozilla
Mozilla consists of two organizations which work together
- Mozilla Foundation
- Mozilla Corporation
I won’t write here about company itself. I just want to highlight that it is possible to make a organization that will earn money, has foundation and still respects privacy
I highly recomment to read Mozilla manifesto on their page. The point from it that I like the most is:
Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical. [2]
Projects
In this part of article I’ll describe all projects I found interesting and to be fair not all of them are focused only on privacy
Hubs
Mozilla Hubs [3] is a true VR chat experience that you can use for free. It allows you to make VR chats, virtual conferences and connect people with respect to their privacy
It is a hudge system which consists of Cloud server and browser app. If you don’t want to use Mozilla servers you can host it on your own machine. I’m extremely impressed by how good this product is
Not only it works smoothly but it allows you to share screen, voice, camera and add custom elements to virtual world
Common Voice
Mozilla Common Voice [4] is a free database of MP3 voice recordings with audio scripts
You can contribute it yourself by using their online tool to record your own speach. I really like the idea of making such things publicly available
People who contribute to this database agreed to send their voice and it’s not like with voice assistants that are constantly listening and improving their alorithms without our consent
Deep Speach
Deep Speach [5] is an open source voice recognition engine. It allows you to build voice recognition software without need to rely on data Microsoft or Googles expensive APIs
It’s not extremaly good and still needs improvements especially for other languages than English but as a free alternative to tools that don’t respect privacy I must say it’s a really good option
Track this
Track this [6] is a tool that was build to spread knowledge about privacy inviding usage of third party cookies which are used by advertisements companies to track your internet habits without your consent
Generally it opens a lot of browser tabs that basically messups trancking alorithms to make them see you as one of 4 preset profiles
I tried it inside virtual machine on compleately new system and browser. The results were pretty fun. If you want to try it I suggest "Filty rich" profile
And more
The projects I highlighted are pretty new and I think not many people recognize them. Either way I wanted to briefly present them to you since they seem really interesting and fun to me
Othe than that I feel like Mozilla is a company that with history which begins near year 2000 still does what it is best at
More projects supported by Mozilla can be found here here
Conclusion
I really hope that Mozilla will continue its work to make internet a safe, secure and respectfull place
And one more thing. As I was reading about Mozilla as company I found one interesting thing. As 8th of March international women day was yesterday I looked on leadership board to see how many women rule this company
I was not expecting to see this since in tech companies still mostly you can see men in top positions. Here it is different. I really would like to see more companies like Mozilla
(One last thing. Firefox, please make duckduckgo as default search engine :) )
Sources
[1] “DuckDuckGo Privacy Newsletters,” DuckDuckGo. https://duckduckgo.com/newsletter
[2] “The Mozilla Manifesto,” Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
[3] “Hubs by Mozilla.” https://hubs.mozilla.com/
[4] “Common Voice by Mozilla.” https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/
[5] “DeepSpeech,” Mozilla Discourse. https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/deepspeech/247
[6] Firefox, “Track This | A New Kind of Incognito,” Track This | A new kind of Incognito. https://trackthis.link