Selena Deckelmann is the Senior Director of Firefox Browser Engineering, and she gave a great talk at Mozilla’s View Source conference titled “Our privacy and the web” that covered a lot of the work that she’s been doing to protect user privacy. Privacy & security is a hot topic with the W3C standards body as well as the browser vendors as there have been many ethical transgressions with how much surveillance capitalism has eroded user privacy. Deckelmann emphasizes that privacy and surveillance are inversely proportional, and so in order to increase the amount of privacy on the web then all of the browser vendors are trying to curtail third-party tracking, fingerprinting, and trying to make the open web a safe place to travel.
I had a chance to talk with Deckelmann at the View Source Conference to get a sense of what type of things that she’s working on in order to implement a privacy-first architecture as well as some of the privacy engineering tradeoffs that she has to navigate. As we move into the immersive web, then there will be even more privacy and security implications that have yet to be solved. But hopefully by exploring some of the lessons learned from the 2D open web, then the immersive web will have a stronger foundation to build upon with it comes to implementing a privacy-first architecture.
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Music: Fatality
