Board members wanted a mobile-focused CEO, report claims. Half of the Mozilla board have quit their positions at the company following the appointment of new CEO Brendan Eich this week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Just a few days ago Mozilla was defending the guy. Good riddance.We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.
Product
Mozilla’s Open Innovation team will work with like-minded technologists and artists to develop technology that combats misinformation.
Mozilla will partner with global media organizations to do this, and also double down on our existing product work in the space, like Pocket, Focus, and Coral. Coral is a Mozilla project that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging.
Literacy
We can’t solve misinformation with technology alone—we also need to educate and empower Internet users, as well as those leading innovative literacy initiatives.
Mozilla will develop a web literacy curriculum that addresses misinformation, and will continue investing in existing projects like the Mission: Information teaching kit.
Research
Misinformation in the digital age is a relatively new phenomenon. To solve such a thorny problem, we first need to fully understand it.
Later this year, Mozilla will be releasing original research on how misinformation impacts users’ experiences online. We will be drawing on a dataset of user-level browsing data gathered during the 2016 U.S. elections.
Creative interventions
Mozilla will field and fund pitches from technologists who are combatting misinformation using various mediums, including virtual reality and augmented reality. It’s an opportunity to apply emerging technology to one of today’s most pressing issues.
In 2017, the Government of India set up a committee headed by Justice Srikrishna to examine a data protection framework and draft India’s first comprehensive data protection law. The Srikrishna Committee was formed in response to the increasing number of concerns on consent, privacy, and data protection by lawyers, organisations and activists.
The Committee has come out with recommendations on data protection that are now open to public consultation.
There have been countless security incidents and cases where private Aadhaar data has been published online. These breaches will only put more Indians at risk as the Government of India is requiring Aadhaar to access more and more services and even private companies are requiring Aadhaar to use their services.
It’s vital that the Srikrishna Committee establish a robust law that will protect the data and privacy of Indian citizens.
We have a rare opportunity to make sure India’s first comprehensive privacy law is as strong as possible.
Join Mozilla’s Executive Chairwoman, Mitchell Baker in signing an open letter to the Justice Srikrishna Committee highlighting our main concerns.
Help Mozilla create a voice for everyone on the Internet!
Donate your voice to help us build open-source speech technology for the Web. Read sentences aloud and rate recordings and transcriptions to help our algorithms learn how real people speak.
We’ll make voices and everything we learn available to developers around the world so they can build the future of voice interaction.