Season 4

Throughout this season, IRL will feature essays from students who are sharing their thoughts on how the web impacts them — for good or bad. This week’s post explores what a Facebook hack taught a teen about privacy.

IRL is also partnering with Common Sense Media for tips on how families can stay safe and strong online. This week’s post explains what families can do to safeguard their data.

Meta Brown is the author of Data Mining for Dummies.

Joseph Turow is the author of The Aisles Have Eyes.

Read Alana Semuels essay, We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things.

And, if you decide to shop online this holiday season, Firefox has you covered with Pricewise, which tracks prices for you across five top US retailers: Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Home Depot and Best Buy.

Your passwords protect more than your accounts. They protect every bit of personal information that resides in them. And hackers rely on bad habits, like using the same password everywhere or using common phrases (p@ssw0rd, anyone?), so that if they hack one account, they can hack many.

Password managers like 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, and Bitwarden generate strong, unique passwords. They also store passwords securely and fill them into websites for you.

IRL listeners can sign up to 1Password and get their first three months for free. Just visit 1password.com/promo/IRL and give it a try.

And, if you use Firefox on your iPhone, try out Firefox Lockbox. It securely gives you access to all the logins you’ve saved to Firefox, in a secure app on your phone.

As we mention in this episode of IRL, Gabriela Ivens cataloged hundreds of secret recipes that were leaked during data breaches. Firefox teamed up with her to show the personal impact a security breach can have on someone. As a bonus, we let you in on those precious recipes to drive the point home. Go have a look — and be sure to try the “Exposed BBQ Spice Rub” — at dataleeks.com.

Want more? Mozilla has teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you perspectives written by students on IRL topics this season. Zues C. from De Marillac Academy wrote this piece on managing your passwords, and managing your life.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on real world reasons parents should care about kids and online privacy.

Three cheers for good passwords (and password managers).

With so many possible articles to read every day online, it can be hard to sort through what to read and what to skip. Help yourself — give Pocket a try, the app and web service featured in today’s episode. Pocket brings you human curated articles that are selected to inspire, inform, and motivate you. Learn more.

Read Ernie Smith’s manifesto to those of us who make reading promises we cannot possibly keep. Like his style? Sign up for his Tedium newsletter.

We mention a bunch of books in this IRL episode — here they are:

• Solitude by Michael Harris
• The End of Absence by Michael Harris
• Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi
• Hit Makers by Derek Thompson
• Book Lust books by Nancy Pearl

Want more? Mozilla has teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you perspectives written by students on IRL topics this season. Cymreiy P. from De Marillac Academy wrote this piece on clickbait and homework.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on how to teach your children about clickbait.

Read the New York Times article on Facebook’s content moderation policies and also Facebook’s response.

Want more? Mozilla has teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you perspectives written by students on IRL topics this season. Nicole M. from De Marillac Academy wrote this piece on inappropriate content online.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on disturbing YouTube videos that are supposed to be for kids.

And finally, this IRL episode’s content underscores the importance of supporting companies committed to ethical tech and humane practices. Thank you for supporting Mozilla by choosing Firefox.

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Read Professor S. Matthew Liao’s Op-Ed Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook? in the New York Times.

Here is Nithin Coca’s story on fully quitting Google.

Mozilla is on your side. Firefox has never — and will never — sell your data. And, we make things that give you more control over your life online. If you love Facebook but hate their data collection practices, reduce what they can track about you. Try Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, which makes it harder for Facebook to track you on the web outside of Facebook.

Want more? Mozilla has teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you perspectives written by students on IRL topics this season. Gisele C. from De Marillac Academy wrote this piece on the importance of diversity in tech.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on the science behind kids’ tech obsessions.

Try out the decentralized endeavors covered in this episode of IRL:

• Mastodon
• Graphite Docs
• MaidSafe
• Popula

Decentralization efforts are proof that the age of internet innovation is far from over. In fact, Mozilla staff work tirelessly on decentralized web standards, which have been — and continue to be — widely adopted.

Mozilla co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group 2014 through 2018, which produced several key decentralized social web standards. Some have dozens of implementations like:

• Webmention (a standard for federating conversations across the decentralized web); and
• MicroPub (a standard API for client applications to post to decentralized web services).

Check out IndieWeb.org for more on key decentralized web standards, and ‘become a citizen’ of the Indie Web.

As a part of Mozilla’s dedication to decentralized innovation, Mozilla participated in the 2018 Decentralized Web Summit:

• See our Founder and Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker’s talk on revitalizing the web;
• Hear Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead, speak on taking back your content with practical decentralization steps; and
• Watch Chris Riley, Head of Policy, lead a web panel on decentralization.

So, are you inspired? Want to work on the decentralized web? Join Mozilla at one of these events:

• Feb 23-24, 2019: IndieWebCamp Austin
• Mar 30-31, 2019: IndieWebCamp New Haven
• May 4-5, 2019: IndieWebCamp Berlin
• June 29-30, 2019: IndieWeb Summit in Portland
• Questions about participating? Ask here.

For more, we’ve teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you articles written by students on IRL topics this season. Accompanying this IRL episode, Huy An N. from De Marillac Academy wrote about centralized social media platforms and privacy. And, see this article from Common Sense Media, on why we need more research on kids and tech (centralized and not).

Coraline Ada Ehmke has been an open source programmer for over 20 years and created the Contributor Covenant. You can also learn about Mozilla’s own community participation guidelines.

Meritocracy as an open source practice is briefly mentioned in this episode. Mozilla has taken steps to discontinue using the word “meritocracy” as a way to describe our governance and leadership structures. Here’s why.

Mozilla is dedicated diversity and inclusion on the web and in the workplace. Learn about our diversity journey.

Firefox is open source and driven by a community of volunteers and contributors. However, in the past decade, representation of women in open source has inched up merely 1.5 percentage points to a shockingly low 3%. Read about the importance of — and efforts to realize — open source gender inclusion.

Like society, the Internet grows stronger with every new voice. What’s healthy and unhealthy on the web when it comes to inclusion? Mozilla’s Internet Health Report has some of the answers.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on kids and technology use.