Polaris
Mission
Polaris is a Mozilla initiative in partnership with like-minded online privacy organizations. Our mission is to accelerate practical advances in privacy technology for the Web, giving users more control, awareness, and protection in their online experiences.
What is Polaris
Polaris is:
- a initiative dedicated to advancing privacy on the web
- a team bridging design, engineering, policy, and product
- a partnership with like-minded organizations in the privacy space
Polaris is NOT:
- a browser
- a single product of any kind
- a single project
Activities
Our activities focus on:
- Product development: we develop, test and refine new features to help consumers manage the tradeoffs between privacy and convenience according to their own desires. We learn from our failures. Our successes launch in Firefox and elsewhere.
- R&D: we continue our long history of privacy and security research and championing of open Internet standards
- Support growth: we are providing resources and material support to important partner projects where Mozilla’s reputation, size, and expertise can fuel massive growth
Current projects
Tracking protection
Objective
Websites need to be able to deliver and monetize the content they create. Users want more protection from online tracking. Tracking Protection is a new platform-level technology that blocks HTTP loads at the network level. Coupled with a user-declared opt-out, such as Do Not Track, we will explore various paths that can provide users with more safety while allowing websites to reliably deliver ads that meet or exceed consumer's tracking preferences.
Implementation
The current blocklist is powered by Disconnect. Tracking Protection's blocklist model and pattern matching was already proven in Safe Browsing. Tracking Protection differs from third-party cookie management and fingerprinting blocking in that Tracking Protection blocks all loads from suspected domains. The idea is "don't talk to domains you don't trust". For more details, see the Tracking Protection main page.
Enabling Tracking Protection
Tracking Protection is enabled as the active experiment once users opt-in to Polaris in Firefox Nightly. To enable Polaris, enter "about:config" in the address bar and then search for browser.polaris.enabled. Set this value to "true" and restart Nightly. Detailed directions for enabling Polaris.
Tor Project Support
Objective
Tor is a very valuable tool for circumventing online censorship and concealing identity online. While future collaborations are planned, the most pressing short-term needs are 1. to alleviate some of the engineering burden on Tor developers by integrating Tor patches into the Gecko platform, and 2. provide some additional bandwidth capacity to the Tor network.
Engineering support
The Tor Browser is built on the Firefox platform. Tor has submitted a list of platform patches that would make it easier for Tor engineers to build the browser. Not all of these patches are achievable. Some are high risk, or low impact, given their complexity. Mozilla will prioritize and begin with the ones likely to offer short-medium term impact.
Network Support
Tor's network size constrains the number of users who can use Tor concurrently. In the short term, Mozilla will help address this by running middle relays on Mozilla servers. As of January 15, 2015, Mozilla middle relays are live running in Q1 prototype mode at globe.torproject.org
Roadmap
| Quarter | Tracking Protection | Tor |
|---|---|---|
| Q4 2014 |
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| Q1 2015 |
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| Q2 2015 |
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Polaris Advisors
Get Involved in Polaris
- IRC: http://irc.mozilla.org #polaris
- Mailing list: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/polaris