| | | | | | Dear Mozilla Supporter,
If you’re like me, then you love the internet. It connects us, entertains us, and helps us in ways unimaginable a generation ago. And as you well know, it has also amplified some of our worst tendencies by stoking violence, driving social division, and promoting fear.
But we at Mozilla are hopeful about the future of our digital world. It’s because of your support and actions alongside hundreds of thousands of people worldwide that we’re feeling optimistic. Together, we’re holding Big Tech accountable in unique and powerful ways. Your participation and donations fuel our actions, and we are proud to be in this fight with you. Here are just a few of the things we’ve been able to accomplish together so far this year:
Fighting for your privacy
The latest edition of Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included consumer tech guide revealed that many of the most popular mental health and prayer apps neglect users’ privacy, harvest sensitive personal data, and capitalize on it as a business asset. Thankfully following the release of our May 2022 report, six of the 28 apps labeled with a privacy warning - for failing to meet Mozilla’s privacy and security standards - improved privacy for their users. 1) Recovery Record; 2) Hallow; 3) Breathe, Think, Do by Sesame; 4) Modern Health; 5) Woebot, and most recently 6) Calm, updated their privacy policies, revised third-party data sharing practices, and made changes to password requirements and screening.
Making tech accessible for all
By 2030, speech is expected to become the primary way people interact with devices. But most of the voice data currently used to train algorithms is held by a handful of major companies, with many missing languages. To help fix this problem and foster innovation and healthy commercial competition, Mozilla is building Common Voice - an open-source, multi-language dataset of voices that anyone can use to train speech-enabled applications and ultimately make it more inclusive and accessible. Already the largest publicly available voice dataset of its kind, it got even bigger. In April 2022, we released more than 20,000 hours of open-source speech data including six new languages — Tigre, Taiwanese (Minnan), Meadow Mari, Bengali, Toki Pona, and Cantonese — and more speech data from female speakers.
Improving Powerful AI
YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world. Its own AI-enabled recommendation engine drives 70% of the 700 million hours viewed on the platform every single day. It’s also one of the largest sources of health misinformation, political disinformation, hateful diatribes, and extremist content. And yet YouTube has met this criticism with inertia and opacity. To gather the information YouTube won’t make public, we created the crowdsourced research project RegretsReporter. And earlier this year we released an updated tool that volunteers are now using to study the effectiveness or limits of YouTube’s ‘user control’ features. Our results will be released soon!
This is just a sample of the critical work that you help fuel. Together, we’re building a future where people have meaningful control over their online experiences, and companies are held accountable when they do not respect people’s choices.
So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your support. Your time, your actions, and your donations make all of this work and progress possible.
Sincerely,
Juan (on behalf of the entire Mozilla team) | |
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