Re: Improving trust and transparency for Suggested Tiles

On 4/24/2015 8:15 PM, Chris Hofmann wrote:
>> - ask the user to approve each new type of suggestion
> this seams like it would get pretty annoying.
>
> It might be better to just give users a menu of the types of content we
> have to offer, and they could check off would like to see mixed in among
> their tiles.


Something like the Discover feature in Opera's new tab?
http://www.operasoftware.com/press/reviews/desktop#discover

I find that instinctively interesting as a product direction, but at the 
moment, Opera Discover seems to be basically a fairly coarse-grained 
news feed, lacking the kind of specificity that makes it interesting.   
(Opera Discover has 1 tier of interest categories and 1 tier of 
geographic preference)

Patrick



>
> That also greatly reduces the need for so much inference out of there
> browsing history, and any problems that might turn up in not being able to
> get that right.
>
> -chofmann
>
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Ed Lee <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> [ For context around Suggested Tiles, please read
>> http://ed.agadak.net/2015/04/whys-and-hows-of-suggested-tiles ]
>>
>> Similar to how we iterate on code to make Firefox faster, more usable, or
>> more functional; we would like to improve on user trust and transparency
>> for Suggested Tiles.
>>
>> The current state of Suggested Tiles in Beta 38 is that Firefox only shows
>> suggestions that match a hardcoded set of top-sites-matching logic. This
>> was done to allow people to verify the source code and have some guarantees
>> around what Firefox can and cannot do.
>>
>> One particular attack this implementation prevents is the arbitrary
>> querying of Firefox top sites data. In the situation that Mozilla did not
>> follow its policies, Firefox could be tricked to show a fake suggestion and
>> report back if the user has visited a specific site.
>>
>> However, this hardcoding approach limits the ability to make better
>> suggestions or improve them quickly. For example, if Firefox only has a
>> predefined "News" matching logic, it wouldn't be able to match on users who
>> are more interested in "Technology News," so if there's a great technology
>> news recommendation, Firefox would show it to way too many people who
>> aren't interested in technology. A related issue is if for some reason a
>> non-news site was put as part of "News," users could get quickly annoyed by
>> seeing things that aren't actually relevant until the next update of
>> Firefox fixes the bug.
>>
>> So assuming that the user control to easily turn off the Suggested Tiles
>> functionality is not enough, what technical measures could be used to
>> improve transparency to help users verify that Mozilla is not doing
>> anything malicious?
>>
>> Here's some initial ideas of what Firefox could do, and I hope people can
>> provide some more:
>>
>> - support specialized update mechanisms
>> - ask the user to approve each new type of suggestion
>> - verify with multiple (non-mozilla?) servers before making suggestions
>> - notify the user of incoming changes a day in advance
>> - allow the user to specify a whitelist/blacklist of sites
>>
>> Ed Lee
>> _______________________________________________
>> dev-planning mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning
>>
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