What if people could get control back and contribute their data to causes and projects they care about? Mozilla Corp. has announced Rally, a privacy-first data sharing platform that puts users in control of their data and empowers them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society.

Mozilla has teamed up with Princeton University researchers to launch the new Rally research initiative, a crowdsourced scientific effort. Computer scientists, social scientists and other researchers will be able to launch groundbreaking studies about the web and invite users to participate.

The company is kickstarting the Rally research initiative with its first two research collaborator studies. The first study is “Political and COVID-19 News” and comes from the Princeton team that helped the company develop the Rally research initiative. This study examines how people engage with news and misinformation about politics and COVID-19 across online services.

Soon, Mozilla will also be launching its second academic study, “Beyond the Paywall”, a study, in partnership with Shoshana Vassermanand Greg Martin of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. It aims to better understand news consumption, what people value in news and the economics that could build a more sustainable ecosystem for newspapers in the online marketplace.

The company is also releasing a toolkit called WebScience that enables researchers to build standardized browser-based studies on Rally. WebScience also encourages data minimization, which is central to how Rally will respect people who choose to participate in studies.

Rally is currently available for Firefox desktop users over age 19 in the United States. The company plans to launch Rally for other web browsers and in other countries in the future.