Mozilla wants to publish users' browsing data

The Mozilla Foundation, like many other organisations, collects "basic, aggregate, anonymized information" about Internet usage from users of its Firefox browser – but it plans to make it publicly available.

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Mitchell Baker, the head of the Mozilla Foundation, wants to publish the data. As she explains in a posting in her blog, she feels that it's a necessary resource: "If everything that is known about the basic usage of the internet is closed and proprietary then the internet as an open platform will suffer."

The data would include site traffic levels, bandwidth and download numbers broken down by region. She is careful to emphasise that not only is the data not personal or individual, but that only grouped numbers would be made available.

As she remarks, such data is often collected but seldom made generally available. Mozilla hopes to change this by making its data available for others to analyse.

(lghp)