‘A choice between one phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it and another phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it’

Mozilla is celebrating the Firefox browser’s 10th birthday, but it’s going on the offensive in the mobile market rather than resting on its laurels.

Chief technology officer Andreas Gal claims that the company’s Firefox OS mobile operating system will bring much-needed change to the smartphone market by highlighting the transparency – or lack of it – from the software of industry leaders Google and Apple.

While both companies are facing more pressure to open up on their relationship with governments following the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA surveillance, Gal suggests that both Android and iOS continue to share a common trait: their reliance on proprietary software with “almost a complete lack of transparency”.

Gal told the Guardian that this should be a concern for people who want to know just what their gadgets are doing with their information. “Right now the user has a choice between one phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it and another phone where you can’t tell what goes on inside it,” Gal said.

He cited Google’s ban of privacy-focused app Disconnect from its official store as one example. Disconnect was designed to block apps from collecting information, but was removed from the Google Play store due to a policy that prevents apps from interfering with others.

Gal thinks that if Mozilla were to make a mobile product similar to its Lightbeam software, which maps where people’s data goes when browsing the web, Google would ban that too.

“What an Android phone essentially is, it’s like Google’s agent in your pocket… they don’t intend to put you first, they put Google first because Google needs to increase their value,” he said.

“They’d like to know things about you and track you so they can target you. Google sets the rules that serve Google in the end, not necessarily the user.”

Apple’s iOS has always been closed, and has shown some privacy-focused apps the door too, including Clueful, a tool created by security firm BitDefender that shines a light on what apps are doing with users’ data. In response, BitDefender released a new web version that could be accessed via the web browser.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea that corporations rule these massive ecosystems with arbitrary rules that sometimes can be completely opposite to what the user wants,” said Gal. “The user should be able to know what is happening to their data and have some influence over it.

Gal added that the debate about governmental influence on popular software in the wake of the Snowden revelations may encourage more people to turn to open source software as a better option for privacy – not least because it can be properly and transparently audited by researchers, who’ll then raise the alert if they discover suspicious code.

Mozilla is hoping that Firefox OS will highlight the strengths and openness of the web, although for now the software is mainly being used for smartphones in emerging markets rather than countries like the US and UK.

“That’s what we hope people will choose over these closed systems,” he said. “We can’t change the industry over night but we can move in the right direction.”

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