Research Question: Online services pose a range of pressing societal problems, including enabling misinformation, undermining competition, and invading personal privacy. We are quantitatively investigating these problems by crowdsourcing data via web browsers.

Data: We are building novel research infrastructure in collaboration with Mozilla, which develops the open-source Firefox web browser. Rally is a new platform for ethically deploying browser-based studies and securely analyzing crowdsourced data. WebScience is a new toolkit for implementing browser-based studies with standardized instrumentation and state-of-the-art attention modeling. 

Methods: Our studies involve surveys, laboratory experiments, browsing measurements, and in-browser interventions.

Challenges: Building this research infrastructure is a multiyear effort, requiring web engineering, user experience design, and participant recruiting.