[$] Mozilla Rally: trading privacy for the "public good"

A new project from Mozilla, which is meant to help researchers collectbrowsing data, but only with the informed consent of the browser-user, is taking a lot ofheat, perhaps in part because the company can never seem to do anythingright, at least in theeyes of some. Mozilla Rally wasannouncedon June 25 as joint venture between the company and researchers atPrinceton University "to enable crowdsourced science for publicgood". The idea is that users can volunteer to give academic studies access tothe same kinds of browser data that is being tracked in some browserstoday. Whether the privacy safeguards are strong enough-and if there is sufficient reason for users to sign up-remains to be seen.