A stronger motivation would be providing a product or service that tangibly adds value to someone's life.
After reading this, I have no idea how Rally would provide any tangible benefits to me.
We don't any more studies or research to know that the best privacy policy is to not collect any data in the first place.
You've replied here with answers to address their (our?) potential concerns, but the commenter never said they had concerns about the project itself, rather that this particular blog post doesn't "sell" or explain the value add well. That's feedback on the project's communication strategy, not on what it's actually doing.
> > Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here.
> The motivation is enabling crowdsourced scientific research that benefits society.
You seem to be confusing "theys". The question is what motivates participants, not what motivates researchers.
Contrarily, you seem to be confusing “theys”, yourself.
There exist participants that are motivated by participating in research that benefits society.
Just like there exist individuals motivated by lending their computing resources to the various @Home research efforts.
Nonetheless, much of psychology research conducted in the US has made do with ridiculous sampling bias - the US college student is anecdotally considered to be the most-studied population in the world.
In other words, every thorough study begins with an assessment and revision of the consensus language being used to describe reality.
On that front alone, psychology is one of the most hard sciences around.
Deep learning is directly attributable to psychology research, for what it is worth.
The idea that this will benefit society seems naive to me. I feel like it will only serve to legitimize the practice by putting ostensibly trustworthy faces on the packaging.
As other commenters have noted, then you should decline to opt-in to participating in research such as this.
Oh, well since it “benefits society”...
Tell me, how is it that you filter for the research that benefits society vs the research that doesn’t?
> What "data"? Browsing history? Identity? Something else?
That depends on the Rally study, since research questions differ and studies are required to practice data minimization. Each study is opt in, with both short-form and long-form explanations. Academic studies also involve IRB-approved informed consent. Take a look at our launch study for an example [1].
> Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here.
The motivation is enabling crowdsourced scientific research that benefits society. Think Apple Research [2], NYU Ad Observatory [3], or The Markup's Citizen Browser [4]. There are many research questions at the intersection of technology and society where conventional methods like web crawls, surveys, and social media feeds aren't sufficient. That's especially true for platform accountability research; the major platforms have generally refused to facilitate independent research that might identify problems, and platform problems often involve targeting and personalization that other methods can't meaningfully examine.
[1] https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/political-and-covi... [2] https://www.apple.com/ios/research-app/ [3] https://adobservatory.org/ [4] https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser