Open Policy & Advocacy

Mozilla's official blog on open Internet policy initiatives and developments
Categories: privacy

Designing Tiles for Trust

Denelle Dixon

3 responses

In August, I wrote about why we believe that trust is the most important currency of the Web. As I explained then, putting the user first, through transparency, choice and control is the only way to bring about the Web we want. In that post, I described several of our efforts designed to help us positively influence the ecosystem to garner more trust from users. One of those efforts was the Tiles feature. To influence the ecosystem, we have to participate in it.

As we move forward with Tiles, we wanted to share more details on our approach and invite your feedback. On November 10, we announced the release of a 10th anniversary edition of Firefox and firmly took our stand as an independent voice on the Web. With the anniversary edition, we made the Tiles experiment a part of Firefox.

We developed Tiles as an engaging and useful experience for our users. We designed the feature with a core focus on our Privacy Principles. Here are a few examples of how those principles influenced the feature:

  1. We ensure that no data is sent to us until you interact with the feature.
  2. You control the feature and can turn it off easily if you don’t find it useful.
  3. You can audit us – all of our code is open and auditable by you. In particular, you can learn more about the code that powers this feature here.
  4. If a user has previously opted into Do Not Track, we assume this means the user does not want to see Tiles so we pref Tiles off for those users. (Note: If a user subsequently opts in to DNT, the user will need to switch Tiles off).
  5. The data we collect is transmitted over HTTPS/TLS.

We’d love your feedback on these principles, and any ideas or suggestions you might have to make Tiles more valuable to users. Leave a comment, or better yet, use this form to submit feedback directly to the Tiles team.

We’re excited to move forward with Tiles and will continue to innovate with ways we can create positive impacts through this feature. Simultaneously, we will use our experiments through our Polaris initiative to test additional ways we can help create transparency, choice and control for our users.

3 comments on “Designing Tiles for Trust”

  1. J.D. Ogre wrote on

    Sorry, too late. Just adding these ads in the first place shows that you are no longer to be trusted.

    1. B.Austin wrote on

      I completely agree! “Just adding these ads in the first place shows that you are no longer to be trusted.” ~ J.D. Ogre.

      (Thank You J.D. for summing it up in one sentence for me.)

  2. Noah B. wrote on

    I _am_ using the Do Not Track option. I do however continue getting sponsored tiles in the Classic mode. There should be a way to disable these ads. Not simply hiding them, but eliminating them. Opting IN should be a requirement for this “feature”. While I have not been as concise as J.D., I will be looking for _better_ browser.