Today is Data Privacy Day, but Mozilla wants you to celebrate good data practices every day. The company has announced a new initiative designed to help companies and projects earn trust, stay lean, and be smart about collecting and using data.
“At Mozilla, we believe that users trust products more when companies build in transparency and user control,” wrote Jishnu Menon, senior director of business and legal affairs at Mozilla, in a blog post. “Earned trust can drive a virtuous cycle of adoption, while conversely, mistrust created by even just a few companies can drive a negative cycle that can damage a whole ecosystem.”
(Related: The White House is keeping track of efforts to maintain data privacy)
As part of its initiative, Mozilla is providing companies and developers with lean data practices that are meant to be a framework for data decisions. The goal is to help companies and developers focus on the data they need, the appropriate security they need to build, and ways they can help users understand how their data is being used.
Questions that companies and developers should ask themselves (according to Mozilla) include: “Do I need this data to provide the value I’m trying to deliver to users through my business or product?” “What protections have I put around the data I’ve collected?” and “Is the way I’m collecting, using and disclosing data clear to my users?”
The company is also providing a toolkit to help implement the lean data practices.
“We use these practices as a starting point for our own decisions about data at Mozilla,” Menon wrote. “We believe that as more companies and projects use Lean Data Practices, the better they will become at earning trust and, ultimately, the more trusted we will all become as an industry.”
