Members of the grand committee and the standing committee, thank you.
I'm here today because all is not well with the Internet. For sure the open Internet is the most powerful communications medium we've ever seen. At its best, it creates new chances to learn to solve big problems to build a shared sense of humanity, and yet we've also seen the power of the Internet used to undermine trust, magnify divisiveness and violate privacy. We can do better, and I'm here to share a few ideas about how.
My name is Alan Davidson. I'm the vice-president for policy, trust and security at the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla is a fairly unusual entity on the Internet. We're entirely owned by a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation. We're a mission-driven open-source software company. We make the Firefox web browser, Pocket and other services.
At Mozilla we're dedicated to making the Internet healthier. For years we've been champions of openness and privacy online, not just as a slogan but as a central reason for being. We try to show by example how to create products to protect privacy. We build those products not just with our employees but with thousands of community contributors around the world.
At Mozilla we believe the Internet can be better. In my time today, I would like to cover three things: first, how privacy starts with good product design; second, the role of privacy regulation; and third, some of the content issues that you folks have been talking about for the last few days.
First off, we believe our industry can do a much better job of protecting privacy in our products. At Mozilla we're trying to do just that. Let me give you one example from our work on web tracking.
When people visit a news website, they expect to see ads from the publisher of that site, from the owner of that website. When visitors to the top news sites, at least in the U.S., visit, they encounter dozens of third party trackers, trackers from sites other than the one that they're visiting, sometimes as many as 30 or 40. Some of those trackers come from household names and some of them are totally obscure companies that most consumers have never heard of.
Regardless, the data collected by these trackers is creating real harm. It can enable divisive political ads. It can shape health insurance decisions and is being used to drive discrimination in housing and jobs. The next time you see a piece of misinformation online, ask yourself where the data came from that suggested that you would be such an inviting target for that misinformation.
At Mozilla we've set out to try to do something about tracking. We created something we call the Facebook container, which greatly limits what Facebook can collect from you when you're browsing on Firefox. It's now, by the way, one of the most popular extensions that we've ever built. Now we're building something called enhanced tracking protection. It's a major new feature in the Firefox browser that blocks almost all third party trackers. This is going to greatly limit the ability of companies that you don't know to secretly track you as you browse around the web.
We're rolling it out to more people, and our ultimate goal is to turn it on by default for everybody. I emphasize that because what we've learned is that creating products with privacy by default is a very powerful thing for users, along with efforts like our lean data practices, which we use to limit the data that we collect in our own product. It's an approach that we hope others adopt, because we've learned that it's really unrealistic to expect that users are going to sort through all of the privacy policies and all the different options that we can give them to protect themselves. To make privacy real, the burden needs to shift from consumers to companies. Unfortunately, not everybody in our industry believes that.
Let me turn to my second point, which is that we believe that regulation will be an essential part of protecting privacy online. The European Union has been a leader in this space. Many other companies around the world are now following suit and trying to build their own new data protection laws. That's important because the approach we've had for the last two decades in our industry is clearly not working anymore. We've really embraced in the past this notion of notice and choice: If we just tell people what we're going to collect and let them opt out, surely they'll be fine. What we found is that this approach is really not working for people. We've been proponents of these new data protection rules, and we hope you will be too.
We believe that a good privacy law should have three main components. It needs clear rules for companies about what they can collect and use; it should have strong rights for individuals, including granular and revocable consent about specific uses; and it should be implemented within an effective and empowered enforcement agency, which is not always the case. We think that's an important component.
Critically, we believe that you can build those laws and you can include those components while still preserving innovation and the beneficial uses of data. That's why we're supporting a new federal privacy law in the U.S. and we're working with regulators in India, Kenya and in other places to promote those laws.
My third point is that given the conversation you have all had for the last few days, I thought it would be useful to touch on at least some of our views on the big issues of content regulation. Of all the issues being examined by the committee, we believe that this is the most difficult.
We've seen that the incentives for many in the industry encourage the spread of misinformation and abuse, yet we also want to be sure that our reactions to those real harms do not themselves undermine the freedom of expression and innovation that have been such a positive force in people's lives on the Internet.
We've taken a couple of different approaches at Mozilla. We're working right now on something we call “accountability processes”. Rather than focusing on individual pieces of content, we should think about the kinds of processes that companies should have to build to attack those issues. We believe that this can be done with a principles-based approach. It's something that's tailored and proportionate to different companies' roles and sizes, so it won't disproportionately impact smaller companies, but it will give more responsibility to larger companies that play a bigger role in the ecosystem.
We've also been really engaged in the issues around disinformation, particularly in the lead-up to the EU parliamentary elections that just happened. We're signatories to the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, which I think is a very important and useful self-regulatory initiative with commitments and principles to stop the spread of disinformation. For our part, we've tried to build tools in Firefox to help people resist online manipulation and make better choices about and understand better what they're seeing online.
We've also made some efforts to push our fellow code signatories to do more about transparency and political advertising. We think a lot more can be done there. Candidly, we've met with mixed results from some of our colleagues. I think there is much more room to improve the tools, particularly the tools that Facebook has put out there for ad transparency. There is maybe some work that Google could do, too. If we can't do that, the problem is that we'll need stronger action from government. Transparency should be a good starting point for us.
In conclusion, I'd say that none of these issues being examined by the committee are simple. The bad news is that the march of technology—with artificial intelligence, the rise of the Internet of things and augmented reality—is only going to make it harder.
A concluding thought is that we really need to think about how we build our societal capacity to grapple with these problems. For example, at Mozilla we've been part of something called the responsible computer science challenge, which is designed to help train the next generation of technologists to understand the ethical implications of what they're building. We support an effort in the U.S. to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment to build out government's capacity to better understand these issues and work more agilely. We're working to improve the diversity in our own company and our industry, which is essential if we're going to build capacity to address these issues. We publish something every year called the “Internet Health Report”, which just came out a couple of weeks ago. It's part of what we view as the massive project we all have to help educate the public so that they can address these issues.
These are just some of the examples and ideas we have about how to work across many different levels. It's designing better products, improving our public regulations and investing in our capacity to address these challenges in the future.
We really thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today and we look forward to working with you and your colleagues around the world to build a better Internet.
Thanks.
