Test Pilot Update & Proposed Guiding Principles

Jinghua Zhang

2 responses

We are excited to give an update on the progress that we’ve made on the guiding principles for the Test Pilot program.

Since we announced the concept of Test Pilot last year, we’ve had hundreds of discussions and a great deal of feedback from a wide range of contributors. While the core concept outlined in that vision continues to guide the project, today we are setting out a proposed set of guiding principles for wider review and feedback.

Guiding principles

Mozilla is an open source community that aims to make the Web a better place by creating an open, participatory and transparent environment. Aligned with this mission, the Test Pilot program wants to build an opt-in platform that encourages people to improve the Web experience by conducting or participating in various studies and tests. Here is the draft principles to guide our project development:

  1. We will run Test Pilot as a standalone opt-in program and not as part of Firefox.
  2. We will never collect user information without first having the participant’s explicit permission.
  3. We will only transmit and store anonymous and sanitized information in order to protect individual privacy.*
  4. We will respect participants and their privacy by making test data knowable, manageable and safe for individuals.

* Note: IP addresses will be transmitted to Mozilla servers (as part of regular internet communications), but they will NOT be associated with test data. We may keep IP addresses as web log data, but only for a certain minimal amount of time, and only for the purposes of optimizing the service and preventing abuse.

What’s Next

As an organization dedicated to the public good, Mozilla treats user privacy and security with the utmost importance. We are now working with engineers and legal experts to figure out best practices to protect individual users’ privacy during testing. If you’re an engineer or legal expert interested in this project, we’d love to hear from you.

We are also starting to plan the first couple of studies, in collaboration with Mozilla’s user experience community. We’ll be posting detailed information on this in the coming weeks as we continue to work through establishing the initial framework for Test Pilot.

Get Involved

  • Provide feedback and help with the design and develop of Test Pilot in the discussion group
  • Join us on #labs on irc.mozilla.org

–Jinghua Zhang, on behalf of the Test Pilot team.

2 responses

  1. marco wrote on :

    I am in for the test pilot team, what’s next step after installing the addon?

  2. Drew Freyman wrote on :

    I’m a start-up guy–I love any opportunity to play with new software and functionality. Also, I have product management experience in Internet, mobile, and browser related projects–I should be able to provide valuable feedback. In particular, having lived in Japan working for Nokia as part of the team rolling out our first mobile browsers (i-mode & WAP), I am very interested in the FENNEC project.