Responding to users' desire for greater internet privacy, Mozilla has joined forces with the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the Tor Project to develop and implement the Polaris initiative, a program aimed at collaborating “more effectively, more explicitly and more directly to bring more privacy features” to Mozilla products.
In a blog post, Mozilla detailed two Polaris experiments that will focus on “anti-censorship technology, anonymity, and cross-site tracking protection.”
In the first, Mozilla engineers will assess Tor Project modifications to Firefox to gauge whether changes to the company's platform codebase will help Tor “work more quickly and easily” and will include high-capacity Tor middle relays.
In the second, the company will examine and test a privacy tool that shields users “from invasive tracking without penalizing advertisers and content sites that respect a user's preference.”