Latest / Mini Scroll / BONUS FROM WEB SUMMIT: Why Should we Care About a "Healthy Internet"? ft. Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers

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BONUS FROM WEB SUMMIT: Why Should we Care About a "Healthy Internet"? ft. Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers · Mini Scroll

• 0:00
  Hi everyone, I obviously couldn't go a whole week without
• 0:05
  publishing a podcast episode. I am just jumping in here
• 0:09
  editing Lauren to let you guys know that this is a special
• 0:14
  bonus episode of Infinite Scroll.
• 0:15
  We got the opportunity to interview the CEO of Mozilla
• 0:19
  Corporation. It was an opportunity that we
• 0:21
  were so excited to get. However, we did run into some
• 0:24
  technical issues and the space that we were given to do the
• 0:29
  podcast interview unfortunately was not a podcast booth.
• 0:32
  It was a room in between two lounges here at Webb Summit in
• 0:36
  Doha. So please bear with the sound.
• 0:40
  I think the quality of our voices is relatively OK, but you
• 0:44
  can hear people like eating lunch in the background.
• 0:46
  You can hear forks and knives and things.
• 0:48
  So anyways, please keep that in mind.
• 0:51
  But the episode is so informative.
• 0:53
  If you really need a breakdown of data privacy, Internet
• 0:58
  health, why you should care about net neutrality, and all of
• 1:02
  these topics that keep floating around in like the tech and
• 1:06
  Internet culture world but feel a little bit too big I think
• 1:10
  sometimes for like the average user to fully grasp, this is the
• 1:14
  episode for you. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy
• 1:17
  this episode and I will talk to you on Monday.
• 1:19
  Bye. Hi everyone, and welcome to a
• 1:22
  bonus episode of Infinite Scroll, a podcast about Internet
• 1:26
  culture, the creator economy, and how social media is shaping
• 1:29
  Gen. Z.
• 1:30
  I am so excited about our bonus episode today because I am
• 1:33
  bringing you guys an interview with probably one of the most
• 1:37
  senior experts that we have ever spoken to on this podcast in
• 1:41
  relation to Internet culture and the digital space.
• 1:44
  I am joined today by Laura Chambers, the CEO of Mozilla
• 1:48
  Corporation. So I have been a fan of Mozilla
• 1:51
  products for years. I was just telling Alex this
• 1:55
  story who works on my team. But when my friends and I first
• 1:58
  went to university and we got our first laptops, we all
• 2:01
  downloaded Firefox right away. That was our preferred browser.
• 2:04
  So I wanted to speak with Laura today because one of the biggest
• 2:08
  misconceptions about millennials and Gen.
• 2:10
  Z is that we all have this in depth understanding of tech and
• 2:14
  Internet culture. But after running this business
• 2:17
  for five years, I have come to realize that's not always the
• 2:19
  case. So today I'll be speaking with
• 2:21
  Laura about the open Internet and user privacy and what those
• 2:25
  actually mean for Genzed. So welcome, Laura.
• 2:28
  Thank you so much. It's lovely to be with you here
• 2:30
  in Doha. Yes, how are you enjoying Web
• 2:33
  Summit? It's the energy is incredible,
• 2:36
  just walking around the floor, there's so many great ideas,
• 2:38
  there's so many passionate people.
• 2:40
  It's lovely to see such a great community working on the future
• 2:43
  of what the Internet should be. First, we're going to tackle
• 2:45
  what keeping the Internet healthy and open really means.
• 2:50
  So this is a big topic, I know, but I know that Mozilla is big
• 2:53
  on prioritizing a healthy and open Internet.
• 2:56
  Could you tell us exactly what that means?
• 2:58
  It's it's probably worth a trip down memory lane.
• 3:00
  If we go back to the early days of the Internet, it was not at
• 3:03
  all guaranteed that it would be the way that it is today.
• 3:06
  We're very used to going to a browser and having complete
• 3:09
  access to all of the Internet. But in the early days it was
• 3:12
  really starting to trend towards closed.
• 3:15
  We all thought that, you know, websites information would be
• 3:18
  behind paywall and not only accessible to a few.
• 3:22
  So in the early days of the Internet, Mozilla and a bunch of
• 3:24
  other very strong advocates fought very hard for the
• 3:27
  Internet to be open so that there would be equal access and
• 3:30
  opportunity for everyone to engage.
• 3:31
  And of course, that's led to the Internet that we have today,
• 3:35
  which is open and has led to so much innovation, creativity,
• 3:38
  access, learning and growth. Obviously, AI is the new
• 3:42
  frontier where it's being challenged again.
• 3:44
  But that's why we stand for openness.
• 3:46
  We shouldn't take it for granted because the Internet left to its
• 3:49
  own devices will always trend towards closed.
• 3:52
  That's where the power accrues. When we talk about healthy
• 3:54
  Internet, again, the the hope of the Internet in the early days
• 3:58
  when you were even downloading that first browser was that the
• 4:02
  Internet should be a place of joy, of creativity, of
• 4:05
  individual expression, of connectivity, and a place that
• 4:10
  pushes society way forward in really positive ways.
• 4:14
  That isn't necessarily the Internet that we're in today,
• 4:16
  right? We're seeing that it's very hard
• 4:18
  to trust content. We're seeing that information is
• 4:21
  being scraped and consumed in different ways.
• 4:23
  We're seeing that communities are being split apart rather
• 4:26
  than brought together. And so when we talk about an
• 4:29
  open and healthy Internet, it's really sort of achieving the
• 4:32
  promise of what the Internet could and should be, which is
• 4:34
  this wonderful place right now. It feels a little like it's
• 4:39
  accruing to a place that's closed where, you know, we're
• 4:43
  sort of fueled by dopamine hits, where we're sort of have
• 4:45
  advertising hounding us everywhere we go.
• 4:48
  It can and should be better than that.
• 4:49
  And that's the fact that we're constantly battling.
• 4:52
  Another big topic just to like, kick us off.
• 4:54
  We're just like tackling them all right at the start.
• 4:56
  Net neutrality. So that is the idea that all
• 4:59
  Internet traffic should be treated equally.
• 5:01
  It's a prominent aspect of keeping the Internet open and
• 5:04
  diverse. Mozilla has been really vocal
• 5:06
  about this, even taking the FCC to court over it a couple of
• 5:10
  years ago. Why is this such a critical
• 5:12
  issue and what do you think the Internet would look like
• 5:15
  without? It well, let's just use a simple
• 5:16
  example, right? So again, net neutrality means
• 5:19
  everyone can have the same equal access to Internet, right?
• 5:22
  You don't have to pay more for speed or access.
• 5:24
  Very similar to what we were talking about, the basic
• 5:27
  principles of an open Internet. So let's give one example.
• 5:30
  Imagine two students, both of them are studying at university.
• 5:34
  They both have Internet at home. One of one can afford to pay
• 5:37
  more for Internet, the other can't, right?
• 5:40
  In a world of net neutrality, they have very different
• 5:43
  experiences where net neutrality goes away.
• 5:45
  And so the people that need access the most have the least
• 5:49
  ability to pay for it and to get it.
• 5:51
  And so it creates to a splintering of society and a
• 5:53
  really a dual world. It doesn't just hurt
• 5:56
  individuals, it also hurts entrepreneurs.
• 5:58
  If you're trying to start a small business and you really
• 6:01
  rely on the Internet for your business to grow, it's unlikely
• 6:04
  that you'd have the same funding, be able to compete with
• 6:07
  the big players. And so you'll have less
• 6:08
  competition and less innovation on the Internet as well.
• 6:12
  And so all those principles we talked about, about a healthy
• 6:14
  and open Internet where everyone can access it, it's a great
• 6:17
  place to be. There's tremendous innovation.
• 6:19
  It pushes the the whole community forward.
• 6:22
  Those things are under threat if net neutrality goes away.
• 6:24
  OK, so overall, the major aspects of a healthy Internet
• 6:28
  sound like they include maintaining Open Access, civil
• 6:31
  discourse, and critical thinking.
• 6:33
  Would you agree? Yes.
• 6:34
  So with increasing concerns around censorship, we've seen
• 6:38
  the rise of algo speak, for example, and other workarounds
• 6:41
  to avoid content suppression online.
• 6:43
  How can everyday users help keep the Internet open while
• 6:46
  navigating these challenges? Yeah.
• 6:48
  So I think one of the critical things you need to do here is to
• 6:53
  make thoughtful choices about what platforms you're on and who
• 6:56
  you support. There are platforms that really
• 7:00
  care about open communication. There are platforms that really
• 7:03
  care about your data privacy and there are others that that don't
• 7:07
  so much, right? And so Mozilla is very much in
• 7:09
  that first camp. We're actually a non profit.
• 7:12
  And so as CEO, my job is not to create profits for shareholders.
• 7:17
  It's actually the coolest job in the world.
• 7:18
  I can go to my board and say I'm going to deliver 0 profit this
• 7:22
  year because I'm doing these extraordinary things for the
• 7:23
  Internet and then be psyched. It's like the best job.
• 7:27
  But what we do care about is privacy, right?
• 7:29
  And so for example, if you use Firefox as a browser, you can be
• 7:33
  really confident that your data isn't going anywhere, that you
• 7:35
  don't choose it to be and it's only being used for your
• 7:38
  benefit. Or in the example of social
• 7:40
  media, you can choose alternative platforms like Blue
• 7:43
  Sky. You can look at things like
• 7:45
  Mastodon about the decentralized web.
• 7:46
  There's a lot of people out there that are creating
• 7:49
  technical alternatives for users so that they can be free and
• 7:52
  open, so that they can't be monitored and censored and
• 7:55
  surveyed. And so voting with your feet, I
• 7:58
  think as as a Gen. Z and as a Internet user is
• 8:01
  really important because you can support those alternatives and
• 8:04
  have better experiences online. So I wanted to circle back to
• 8:08
  how you touched on AI earlier. Obviously, AI has become such a
• 8:12
  big part of the Internet these past few years, especially when
• 8:15
  it comes to moderation. But at the same time, there is
• 8:18
  this growing concern that AI has killed the Internet, quote UN
• 8:21
  quote, with theories circulating like the dead Internet theory,
• 8:25
  which claims that AI run bots surpass human generated content
• 8:28
  online. So I am curious to hear where
• 8:31
  you think AI fits into the future of an open and healthy
• 8:35
  Internet. And also I'm I'm just curious
• 8:36
  from my own perspective, do you believe in the dead Internet
• 8:39
  theory? Look, I think the Internet, the
• 8:41
  experience of the Internet is so different.
• 8:43
  I have my kids, Gen. Z and Gen.
• 8:45
  Alpha, and they are growing up in the world where you can't
• 8:49
  trust anything that you see. You know, I used to see a photo
• 8:52
  and say, what a beautiful photo. They see a photo and say, is it
• 8:55
  fake? Right.
• 8:56
  Like just a completely different experience of the world around
• 8:59
  you and of the Internet. So I think that there is still
• 9:02
  going to be amazing content on the Internet.
• 9:05
  I think it's going to be harder to find.
• 9:08
  And so that's why we're investing in tools that can help
• 9:11
  with that. We think that creating the
• 9:13
  infrastructure around trust, transparency, choice in the
• 9:17
  world of AI is going to be really important.
• 9:19
  There's a lot of forces that would pull those away, but we're
• 9:22
  trying to create counter forces for it.
• 9:24
  One very simple example, we created a, an extension on the
• 9:28
  Firefox browser, it's called Deep Fake Detector.
• 9:31
  It's very simple. You can just get it to scan some
• 9:33
  text and it will tell you whether it is likely human
• 9:36
  written or not. Very, very simple.
• 9:38
  But the team's done great work. We've brought in some of the
• 9:40
  best sort of scientists and thinkers in the world around
• 9:44
  this and we launched it. It's in beta right now and we
• 9:48
  open source the code so that others can build on it and
• 9:50
  create and do all that type of stuff.
• 9:52
  So yes, there's rubbish out there.
• 9:54
  There's probably going to be a lot more rubbish out there, but
• 9:57
  we can use technology, right? And we can work with other
• 9:59
  technologists and other entrepreneurs to build
• 10:02
  alternatives so that it is still joyful and easy to navigate.
• 10:06
  It just takes more work than it used to do.
• 10:08
  OK, so I wanted to kind of switch gears a little bit and
• 10:10
  move to privacy online. So as platforms rely more on AI
• 10:16
  for moderation and data-driven decision making, questions
• 10:19
  around user privacy and data security become even more
• 10:22
  pressing. Obviously, privacy is a massive
• 10:25
  topic in the online world, but broadly speaking, discussions
• 10:29
  around online privacy seem to fall into two big conversations,
• 10:32
  users choosing to stay anonymous online and the way that the tech
• 10:37
  giants collect and use our data. So do you think that this is a
• 10:41
  fair distinction or are there other key aspects that we should
• 10:44
  be considering as well? Yeah, I think, I think it could
• 10:47
  be very easy to be complacent about your data and your
• 10:51
  information online. I think again, when I started on
• 10:54
  the Internet, we were so like precious about every single
• 10:58
  data, every single piece. And over time, somehow it
• 11:01
  changed. And I think people growing up
• 11:03
  now probably just assume that someone's got all their
• 11:05
  information everywhere. And it would be easy to be
• 11:07
  dismissive of it, but we shouldn't be.
• 11:10
  And, and there's a few really key reasons why.
• 11:12
  The first is around just knowing that when you're using products
• 11:16
  that consume all your data, they're using them back at you
• 11:20
  to influence you. And they're using it not for
• 11:22
  your own best interest, but you know, to to make money, which is
• 11:25
  the job of companies. That's OK, but it's important to
• 11:27
  be aware of that. So for example, if they have all
• 11:29
  of your browsing information or of your shopping information,
• 11:33
  they're going to be changing your experience online to nudge
• 11:37
  your behavior to get you to buy something to shape the way you
• 11:41
  spend your time, right? And so the more data that you
• 11:44
  give, the more power you give to other people to shape who you
• 11:47
  are and what you do and where you spend your money.
• 11:49
  So it's good to be aware of that, right?
• 11:51
  The second thing that's good to be aware of is the more that
• 11:54
  data that's collected from you and by the way, AI is only going
• 11:58
  to amplify this, right? The more that there's
• 12:01
  opportunities to survey what what's going on with you and
• 12:05
  that can lead to profiling. It's a lot of scary things that
• 12:08
  can happen to people where the information that's collected on
• 12:10
  you can be used against you by people that have access to that
• 12:14
  information. And I'd say even if you don't
• 12:16
  care about any of those things, right, and some people don't,
• 12:18
  you should still care about your communities, right?
• 12:20
  There are people that are really worried about this and very
• 12:22
  vulnerable to it. And so again, I think Gen.
• 12:25
  Z is a generation is incredibly digitally aware, but I think
• 12:30
  could play such a critical role in expecting more demanding more
• 12:34
  transparency, demanding more information and control over
• 12:37
  what happens to their data. And also, as we said before, by
• 12:40
  voting with their feet, like making choices, spending your
• 12:43
  money, spending your time on platforms that are aligned with
• 12:46
  your values could have a huge impact.
• 12:48
  So I know it's easy to be a little complacent about privacy
• 12:51
  and anonymity and and to make it sort of oversimplified, but
• 12:55
  they're really critical things. And that the work that this
• 12:58
  generation is doing now is going to shape the future for the next
• 13:02
  generations as well. We shouldn't take it for granted
• 13:04
  that everyone gets access to your daddy.
• 13:06
  You should own it. You should be clear on how it's
• 13:07
  being used. You should be clear that it's
• 13:08
  being used for your own benefit. Yeah, that's one of the biggest
• 13:11
  things that I hear amongst my age group and younger is like, I
• 13:15
  don't care about where my data goes because I want better ads
• 13:18
  on Instagram or whatever it is. It's so true.
• 13:21
  It's something that I think, I mean, as I said in the intro, we
• 13:24
  do think that Jen's Z millennials, we are, you know,
• 13:28
  the most kind of tech savvy generations.
• 13:30
  But when it comes to things like this, I think a lot of times
• 13:33
  it's like, well, why should I care?
• 13:35
  Actually, advertising is a great example.
• 13:37
  So advertising has been around on the Internet forever.
• 13:40
  It's actually a really important part of the Internet.
• 13:41
  It's how the Internet is monetized, which allows a lot of
• 13:44
  companies to be successful and actually for the Internet to be
• 13:47
  free and open for users, that's great.
• 13:50
  What we don't like and what we've never liked about
• 13:52
  advertising is how your data is stored and used.
• 13:55
  And so at Mozilla, we're actually tackling that.
• 13:57
  So we're investing in some really great technology.
• 13:59
  We just bought a company called Anonym Actually, that will
• 14:03
  ensure it's got the technology to ensure that if your data is
• 14:06
  pulled in for advertising, it is anonymized, it is grouped, it is
• 14:11
  sort of the individual, the very personal, individual pieces are
• 14:14
  taken out of it. So you can still have great ads,
• 14:17
  you can still participate, but it doesn't need to.
• 14:21
  They don't need all the data that they take right.
• 14:23
  You can still get great performance using much better
• 14:26
  technology. There's things like double
• 14:29
  encrypted clean rooms. We've got advances in
• 14:32
  cryptography. We have differential privacy.
• 14:34
  There is technology that can make advertising work, but make
• 14:38
  it more privacy conscious. Everyone should be advocating
• 14:41
  for that, right? And advertisers and publishers
• 14:44
  won't do it unless there's pressure, because why bother?
• 14:47
  But we are creating the technology.
• 14:49
  We're building the platforms for it.
• 14:50
  What we also need to do is build the awareness so that regulators
• 14:53
  and users demand it, because we all should.
• 14:55
  It's very reasonable for that to happen.
• 14:58
  Absolutely. I think it's that awareness
• 15:00
  piece that is often missing for sure.
• 15:02
  So the conversation around privacy has really accelerated
• 15:05
  in these past few years, arguably due to the growing
• 15:08
  power of tech giants obviously, and the fact that AI tools are
• 15:11
  being trained on our digital footprint.
• 15:14
  Why do you think that digital privacy conversations have
• 15:18
  gained so much traction recently, and how do you see
• 15:21
  them moving forward? Yeah, well, so it's back to the
• 15:23
  early days, right? In the early days of the
• 15:25
  Internet, we were all super excited about privacy and very
• 15:27
  aware of it. And then it's it's gone away.
• 15:30
  This is really interesting. I was speaking to a behavioral
• 15:33
  scientist research the other day that helped me understand this
• 15:36
  disconnect between the fact that we should care about safety and
• 15:39
  privacy on the Internet, but we kind of don't.
• 15:43
  And he described like sort of physiologically, as humans, we
• 15:47
  are to have sensory input to let us know if we're safe or not.
• 15:51
  So if we're a dark in a dark alley and we hear a rustle, like
• 15:54
  we're aware and we're alert, that doesn't happen on the
• 15:57
  Internet. You're not getting any signals,
• 15:59
  you're not hearing someone sniff your cookies, right?
• 16:01
  Like there's there's nothing going on for us to have that
• 16:04
  physiological reaction that you need to take safety seriously.
• 16:08
  And so that's that's a big challenge for us to bridge the
• 16:11
  awareness and the care and the concern about this.
• 16:13
  I think to your question, the reason it's relevant right now
• 16:16
  is Gen. AI, right?
• 16:17
  Like if you, everyone is working towards agents, agents are going
• 16:21
  to suck up all of your data. Like look at all of your emails,
• 16:24
  all of your calendar, all of your, you know, daily
• 16:28
  discussions, all of your documents with the goal of, you
• 16:31
  know, making your life easier by doing actions for you and and so
• 16:34
  forth. And so people are now like, wow,
• 16:36
  that's everything, right? It's my entire computer.
• 16:39
  My entire life will be sucked up to this agent and the utility
• 16:43
  sounds interesting, right? If it could make my life easier,
• 16:46
  but it's a whole new level of data consumption.
• 16:49
  And so again, agents can be great, right?
• 16:52
  Like we all would love our lives to be better and easier, but how
• 16:55
  can we use technology to make it better?
• 16:57
  So for example, what if we could run agents locally on your
• 17:02
  device? You know, that would take some
• 17:04
  work to get the the data usage down and the cost down.
• 17:07
  A lot of people are working on it.
• 17:08
  But if it stays on your device instead of going to the cloud,
• 17:12
  you can have the same utility, but it's way more private,
• 17:16
  right? And so we're working a lot with
• 17:17
  entrepreneurs. We just ran a builders program
• 17:19
  and our whole focus was local AI, right?
• 17:22
  Like how can we bring AI onto your device so it can be more
• 17:25
  private and actually run faster and cheaper?
• 17:28
  There's some great innovation going there.
• 17:29
  So I think that people are worried.
• 17:31
  They should be worried, you know, but but look for the
• 17:34
  people that are doing great things and and choose solutions
• 17:37
  that are keeping your information more private and
• 17:39
  more secure. All right, I want to pivot one
• 17:42
  last time. I wanted to talk a little bit
• 17:45
  more about Mozilla and privacy. I know you've mentioned it here
• 17:48
  and there, but user privacy is clearly a priority for Mozilla,
• 17:52
  especially with the Firefox browser.
• 17:54
  Could you break it down in layman's terms?
• 17:57
  What does Mozilla do to protect privacy?
• 18:00
  Well, so privacy is, as you said, the core of what we do.
• 18:03
  And so it is built in by default.
• 18:05
  There is so much work behind the scenes on the Firefox browser in
• 18:09
  particular to keep your data private.
• 18:11
  The first thing is we don't collect your data unless we have
• 18:14
  to and unless it's in your benefit.
• 18:16
  And if we do collect it, we give you choice, right?
• 18:18
  And really clear choice. So we are actually private by
• 18:21
  default, which is not the way that other people are.
• 18:24
  Let's make that practical, right?
• 18:25
  What are some examples of why that might matter?
• 18:27
  One is banking information. So if you ask anyone that is a
• 18:31
  really thoughtful technologist in the space of privacy, they
• 18:35
  will tell you that they might use different browsers for
• 18:37
  different activities, but they always come to Firefox.
• 18:40
  If they have to do banking, they just know it's more secure.
• 18:43
  Another example, this goes back to local that we were talking
• 18:46
  about before is translation. So a lot of browsers will
• 18:49
  translate things for you from different languages on the
• 18:51
  browser. When we do it, we do it locally
• 18:55
  on your device. No information gets sent to a
• 18:57
  server. And so for example, imagine if
• 19:00
  you are living in a different country and you get a tax
• 19:02
  return. You don't know how to read it,
• 19:04
  you're going to use a translator, but that like
• 19:06
  imagine all of your tax return information sitting on a cloud
• 19:10
  somewhere being used for whatever or being given to
• 19:13
  whoever, I don't know. But if you use the, if you use
• 19:16
  Firefox, it happens locally on the on the device.
• 19:19
  And so in every feature we do, we're always looking at how do
• 19:22
  we minimize the data. If we collect data, how do we
• 19:25
  keep it very anonymous and very secure?
• 19:28
  And how do we make sure that it's being used for you and what
• 19:30
  you want to do versus making profits for us.
• 19:34
  And we've made a lot of choices over time that are for the user
• 19:37
  and for privacy, not-for-profit. We got rid of cookies early on.
• 19:40
  It cost us a lot of money as a business to do it, but we did it
• 19:43
  because it's the right thing to do.
• 19:46
  And so that's it's, it's so central to everything we do.
• 19:48
  But those are some of the ways that it it comes to life, I
• 19:50
  think, for users. Mozilla also has a reputation
• 19:53
  for being transparent, as you have just been about your
• 19:56
  privacy practices. How does this transparency help
• 20:00
  foster trust, and what does Mozilla do to communicate these
• 20:03
  efforts to users? Yeah.
• 20:04
  So we we're spending a ton of time on this and we do
• 20:07
  constantly. So that again, as I said, we're,
• 20:10
  we're private by default, but what we want to do and we're,
• 20:13
  we're coming up with new ways of doing this.
• 20:15
  So you'll actually see a lot of this coming from us over the
• 20:17
  next year or so is to give users a very clear choice.
• 20:21
  So for example, if, if you like shopping and you let us know
• 20:25
  that you like shopping, we may say to you, hey, we've got this
• 20:27
  fantastic product called Review Checker.
• 20:30
  Would you like to switch it on? Here's the data that it would
• 20:33
  collect. Here's how we would keep that
• 20:35
  data safe. And here's the benefit that you
• 20:37
  would get from that, right? And so surfacing these
• 20:40
  opportunities to people, where people love utility, they love
• 20:43
  these different experiences, they're fantastic, but you need
• 20:47
  to have the choice and have the agency for it rather than it
• 20:50
  being just default on and all your data sucked up.
• 20:53
  Now you need to do that in a way that isn't complicated.
• 20:55
  Like people don't love thousands of choices being thrown at them
• 20:58
  all the time. And so that's the balance that
• 21:00
  we need to draw. But we're really in everything
• 21:03
  we do. We just want people to know, we
• 21:04
  want to be clear about it and we want you to be in the driver's
• 21:06
  seat so you can make your own trade-offs about what data you
• 21:10
  want collected and what benefit you want to get from it.
• 21:13
  Breaches have been increasingly common, eroding user trust in
• 21:17
  platforms, browsers, and search engines.
• 21:19
  What role does Mozilla play in preventing these breaches, and
• 21:23
  how do you rebuild the trust when the privacy is compromised?
• 21:26
  Yeah. So we have an incredibly
• 21:29
  talented team that look at this not just for Firefox, but across
• 21:33
  the web. We're always monitoring data
• 21:35
  issues and problems. And if anything comes up in the
• 21:38
  browser, the team is extremely fast at solving it, like world
• 21:42
  class. And also if we know there's
• 21:44
  issues with other browsers or companies, we work with them
• 21:46
  very proactively and quickly as well.
• 21:47
  So we, this is a core strength of Firefox.
• 21:50
  As you can imagine, the team's pretty passionate about data.
• 21:52
  We take it very seriously and we're always monitoring and
• 21:55
  very, very quick about it. We've also developed tools
• 21:58
  again, to put the power back in the hands of users.
• 22:00
  So we have a product called Monitor.
• 22:02
  I use it, it's pretty cool. And what Monitor does is it
• 22:07
  scours the Internet for information about you that's out
• 22:09
  there. And it shows you what's out
• 22:11
  there and it can clean it up and it's just sits there in the
• 22:14
  background doing it all the time on your behalf.
• 22:17
  Good product. So those are the types of things
• 22:19
  where we're trying to really make it, again, transparent, put
• 22:22
  you in control so that you can see what's out there about you
• 22:25
  and have have control over who gets to have your data and get
• 22:28
  rid of it if you don't want them to have it.
• 22:30
  Amazing. OK, well, I have one last
• 22:32
  question for you, Laura. Many digital tools today are
• 22:35
  based on personalization, which often requires collecting data.
• 22:39
  Do you think that the drive for personalization will always
• 22:42
  conflict with privacy concerns or can both be achieved in a
• 22:45
  balanced way? And the reason why I asked this
• 22:49
  is obviously, I mean, as you just said, you have a child that
• 22:52
  is Gen. Z Personalization is like the
• 22:54
  number one thing that Gen. Z looks for in fashion, beauty,
• 22:58
  any product that they're consuming.
• 23:00
  Yeah, personalization is great, right?
• 23:01
  We and that comes to this kind of core need.
• 23:04
  We want the world to reflect ours.
• 23:05
  We want to shape our world. It it doesn't need to be in
• 23:08
  conflict with privacy, right. And that's the example we gave
• 23:11
  before about advertising. You can have a great
• 23:13
  advertising, you can have ads that are personalized, but I
• 23:16
  don't need to know that you on a Tuesday bought a pair of red
• 23:19
  shoes in this particular shop at 2:00 PM and then do this other.
• 23:23
  I don't need to know that amount of detail that borders on a
• 23:26
  little creepy. But that data can be brought
• 23:29
  into a system. It can be encrypted, it can be
• 23:31
  anonymized, it can be generalized, and then we can
• 23:33
  still bring stuff back to you that is relevant.
• 23:35
  So their personalization can happen.
• 23:38
  Innovation can happen while keeping privacy standards high.
• 23:42
  That technology is available, just needs to become standard
• 23:45
  and that's what we're pushing on with our own products, with the
• 23:48
  industry and also with regulators to create sort of a
• 23:52
  better balance for users. Amazing.
• 23:54
  Well, thank you so much. I think this has been really
• 23:57
  informative. This is like Education 101 I
• 24:00
  feel. Thank you so much for joining me
• 24:02
  today, Laura. So that is it for this bonus
• 24:05
  episode. You guys, I love you.
• 24:07
  Please rate, review and subscribe.
• 24:09
  I miss chatting with you guys every single day, but I am off
• 24:12
  doing my founder girl shit this week.
• 24:14
  But I will be back in your ears every single day on Monday.
• 24:17
  Bye.