Over the last few months, Mozilla has made a very strong play across all digital channels to influence conversations around more accountability from big tech firms, data use transparency, ethical use of AI.
The avalanche of incidents since Cambridge Analytica scandal has sparked a healthy debate across political spectrums as well as privacy groups on a few topics:
- Power of the big companies with access to a lot of customer data
- User consent around data
collection and data use. Organizational accountability for when data breaches
happen as well as when customers want their data erased.
- Who really owns the data?
- Power of advertising platforms in influencing customers through ads and subconsciously changing their behavior
- Ethical use of AI and ML and what are the boundaries that should not be crossed
- Tackling the challenge of fake news which spreads like wild fire across social media. This is a problem when machines can create fake videos at scale
Mozilla seems to be hitting all these topics hard over the last few weeks. I built an email scraper to scrape through all my emails and identify the trends and associated agenda.
| Topic | Headline | Interesting Lines from Email |
| AI | Do you trust artificial intelligence to include ethics? | |
| AI | Last call for AI Input | |
| AI | Seven quick questions about artificial intelligence | |
| AI | Quick Question | As artificial intelligence increasingly affects our online lives, is Mozilla bringing these issues to the forefront? |
| YouTube | Regrets | Stories about YouTube recommendations gone wrong. |
| YouTube | Who can you trust these days | It’s an uphill battle to hold big companies like YouTube accountable. And we’re only able to fight that fight because of people like you who give. |
| YouTube | Any YouTube regrets since our last message? | We’re meeting with YouTube next week to ask them to fix the problem of harmful content amplified by their recommendation engine, so if you have any stories about how YouTube’s recommendations led you down a bizarre rabbit hole, we’d love to hear them. |
| YouTube | Tell us your biggest YouTube regret | YouTube’s recommendation engine can lead users down bizarre rabbit holes — and they’re not always harmless. |
| Search / Health of Internet | An important story about online manipulation. | how search algorithms feed an internet so ravenous for content that facts are optional. |
| Search / Health of Internet | Online manipulation: Mom & son answer your questions | |
| Voice Assistant/ Apple and Amazon | Is Alexa always listening? | At the end of July, The Guardian reported that people at Apple were regularly listening to recordings of deeply personal events such as conversations with doctors, sexual encounters, and other moments. |
| Voice Assistant | When your AI assistant misbehaves | They use our interactions with them to gather and store reams of data on us, and then they crunch this data using artificial intelligence (AI) to make predictions about our needs, so they can better serve us, market to us, and potentially one day manipulate us. |
I cannot imagine anyone escaping the “end of the world” tone of these emails. It does leave a sour thought in your head about technology in general and all the things that can go wrong. Mozilla has been doing a great job leading the charge on this mission not just in the content they create but also in the products they have built.
As marketers, we never wish to be caught on the wrong side of this debate around privacy, transparency around use of data and user consent. We also do not like to be associated with platforms that are caught on the wrong side. While some things in the data ecosystem are under our control, there are a lot of aspects of digital advertising that are beyond our control. So, all that we can do is to keep a pulse on customer unrest, assess impacts to brand safety and then take actions (cancel advertising on a platform or have a clear statement ready on why/how we use them).
Future of marketing will rely on our ability to be transparent with data collection and its use, associated explicit user consent and our public commitment to protection of privacy. Mozilla is hitting really hard on all these points. They are essential to success of digital advertising, so I do pay a lot of attention to how hard Mozilla is lobbying in its effort to draw attention of customers.
I am particularly intrigued by the products that it is coming out as add ons to its browser:
- Facebook Container: Prevent Facebook from tracking you around the web. Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies.
- Firefox Multi-Account Containers: Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.
While this does address the part about cookie isolation. I am not sure how does it address the fact that organizations do capture device Ids and use device fingerprinting techniques to capture more persistent ids that are not cookie dependent.
And on the note about cookies, Mozilla created an addon called Collusion about 7 years ago which was also spoken about in a Ted Talk. I was amazed at how great it was. I cannot find the addon anymore. Not sure what happened if the mission was always to keep the internet safe.
