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Mozilla: Rust, 7 Years at Mozilla and Surveillance

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 29th of April 2020 09:58:08 PM Filed under
Moz/FF
  • This Week in Rust 336
  • Julien Vehent: 7 years at Mozilla

    Seven years ago, on April 29th 2013, I walked into the old Castro Street Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View for my week of onboarding and orientation. Jubilant and full of imposter syndrom, that day marked the start of a whole new era in my professional career.

    I'm not going to spend an entire post reminiscing about the good ol' days (though those days were good indeed). Instead, I thought it might be useful to share a few things that I've learned over the last seven years, as I went from senior engineer to senior manager.

  • Contact Tracing, Governments, and Data

    Digital contact tracing apps have emerged in recent weeks as one potential tool in a suite of solutions that would allow countries around the world to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and get people back to their daily lives. These apps raise a number of challenging privacy issues and have been subject to extensive technical analysis and argument. One important question that policymakers are grappling with is whether they should pursue more centralized designs that share contact information with a central authority, or decentralized ones that leave contact information on people’s devices and out of the reach of governments and companies.

    Firefox Chief Technology Officer Eric Rescorla has an excellent overview of these competing design approaches, with their different potential risks and benefits. One critical insight he provides is that there is no Silicon Valley wizardry that will easily solve our problems. These different designs present us with different trade-offs and policy choices.

    In this post, we want to provide a direct answer to one policy choice: Our view is that centralized designs present serious risk and should be disfavored. While decentralized systems present concerns of their own, their privacy properties are generally superior in situations where governments have chosen to deploy contact tracing apps.

    [...]

    Moreover, as Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman observes, the norms we establish today will live far beyond any particular app. This is an opportunity to establish the precedent that privacy is not optional. Centralized contact tracing apps threaten to do the opposite, normalizing systems to track citizens at scale. The technology we build today will likely live on. But even if it doesn’t, the decisions we make today will have repercussions beyond our current crisis and after we’ve sunset any particular app.

    At Mozilla, we know about the pitfalls of expansive data collection. We are not experts in public health. In this moment of crisis, we need to take our cue from public health professionals about the problems they need to solve. But we also want policymakers, and the developers building these tools, to be mindful of the full costs of the solutions before them.

  • Looking at designs for COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

    A number of the proposals for how to manage the COVID-19 pandemic rely on being able to determine who has come into contact with infected people and therefore are at risk of infection themselves. Singapore, Taiwan and Israel have already deployed phone-based tracking technology and several recent proposals for re-opening the US economy depend on some sort of contact tracing system. There has been a huge amount of work in this area (see the list here), with perhaps the best known effort being the joint announcement by Apple and Google. that they would be building this kind of functionality into iOS and Android.

    To some extent what’s going on here is just that this is a nicely packaged, accessible, technical problem — learn some things, keep others secret? Sounds like a job for crypto! — and so we have a number of approaches that are quite similar. However, the other thing you see is that these solutions embed quite different assumptions about how they are going to be used and what kind of privacy properties you need and that ends up giving you a variety of different designs.1

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