Privacy For All: Mozilla’s Campaign to Think Globally, Act Locally on Privacy and AI

Mozilla's Privacy for All campaign is a global initiative aimed at raising data privacy standards and laying the groundwork for successful AI regulation. The campaign follows the most recent edition of Mozilla's Privacy Not Included (PNI) guide, which examines AI chatbots and reveals how little information is available about how these models work, including what personal data is collected and used in these systems.

The PNI guide has investigated everything from connected cars to reproductive health apps and found that gaining transparency into AI products is a particularly difficult task. For example, the guide struggled to find enough information about how language models (LLMs) work, what data they're trained on, how they'll behave, as well as information on how personal data and users' conversations are treated.

The campaign will feature content from Mozilla campaigners, fellows, and researchers about data privacy developments across the world, from product to policy and beyond. It will also work with civil society groups around the world that have spent years championing privacy protections.

Privacy and AI are inextricably linked. The AI arms race has incentivized companies to scrape and amass as much data as possible for competitive advantage, with little regard for peoples' privacy. For us to have trustworthy AI, we must think about privacy from a global perspective. Data knows no borders. Companies often rush to countries with lower data protection standards — especially in the Global Majority — to access the data and labor needed to train, build, and deploy systems elsewhere.

The campaign will focus strategically on passing a federal privacy law in the U.S. The U.S.'s outsized market and current legal void put millions at risk and lower how privacy is felt and experienced around the world. Many industry actors claim to support a federal privacy law, but companies' actions reveal their priorities are to pass a weak federal standard that preempts or bypasses stronger state privacy laws.

To address this, Mozilla will work with civil society organizations, researchers, technologists, and consumers to build broad support for a strong, federal privacy standard. Underpinning Privacy For All are 10 core privacy principles, including basic transparency and notice, transparency over AI, limits on third-party sharing, sensitive data protection, basic data rights for consumers, reform the data broker industry, civil rights protections, no deceptive designs, easy ways to express your privacy preferences once and for all, through browser opt-out signals.

In essence, data privacy is AI policy. The work Mozilla has invested in on Trustworthy AI over the years has taught us as much. Transparency — a core principle of data privacy — is a perhaps unglamorous but absolutely necessary step that allows regulators to investigate systems for bias and discrimination, gives researchers access to study societal harms, and empowers consumers to make informed choices. Transparency will also be key to ensuring AI is used to benefit, not harm, our communities.

For 25 years, Mozilla has been on the frontlines defending your privacy. With the stakes higher than they've ever been, we're doubling down until we truly have privacy for all.