During London Tech Week, Mozilla hosted the first UK edition of Mozilla Mornings, our breakfast-discussion series on the digital questions of the moment. We brought together technologists, policymakers, industry, civil society and researchers to ask how the UK can drive forward responsible innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in ways that protect people, strengthen trust and keep digital markets open.
The role of PETs in building a better internet
Protecting people’s privacy has always been central to Mozilla’s mission to build a better internet – one where privacy and security are fundamental, people have meaningful control over their data and online lives, and independent actors can compete on a level playing field. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are an important part of that vision. They help minimise the amount of personal data that needs to be collected and processed while enabling useful functionality. In Firefox, this work includes technologies such as .
PETs encompass a broad family of technical, architectural and product-design approaches where data analysis, measurement, collaboration, access and computation happen with lower privacy risk.
Advancing both privacy and competition together is key to a healthier internet ecosystem. Advertising illustrates both the challenge and the opportunity. It keeps most of the web free and accessible, but today’s dominant model leans on hidden data collection and opaque systems that work around people rather than with them. Solutions that simply hand more data, more infrastructure or more decision-making power to a handful of large companies do not fix that.
Importantly, PETs should not be viewed as a way to bypass privacy rules. Their value lies in reducing the amount of personal data that needs to be collected, shared or processed in the first place, while preserving useful functionality where appropriate. That is why we have been to the government on possible online advertising exceptions to Regulation 6 PECR. As we set out in our submission to the ICO’s call for views on online advertising, we support reform that incentivises privacy-preserving practices while keeping consent the default for high-risk practices.
Gijs Kruitbosch, Principal Engineer at Mozilla, then gave a technical demonstration of how Mozilla uses PETs and privacy-preserving design in Firefox, including on New Tab, where relevance can be improved through approaches that reduce reliance on user identifiers and server-side user profiles.
The panel, moderated by Mozilla’s Kirsten Nelson-de Búrca, widened the lens well beyond advertising. Speakers from eyeo, OpenMined, the Open Data Institute and the Information Society Law Centre discussed how PETs are governed and used across sectors, and how their deployment could affect competition as well as privacy. The discussion explored public-interest examples, including federated rare-disease and genomic research that lets analysis happen without data leaving an institution or a country, and emerging routes for external researchers to study platform data.
A recurring theme was that successful deployment depends as much on governance and public trust as it does on mathematics. PETs have the potential to reduce the competitive advantages associated with large-scale personal data collection, but they could also entrench incumbents if the relevant infrastructure is closed, proprietary or expensive to audit. The discussion complicated the familiar trade-off between privacy and competition, arguing that it eases when PETs are built in the open, on shared standards, with interoperable and auditable implementations and real routes for smaller players and new entrants to take part.
What comes next
The most important questions were the ones we left without tidy answers. Who gets to set standards, and are they set in the open? How do smaller players actually participate, rather than being told they may? What forms of assurance or audit are needed before policymakers can rely on privacy claims? And how should PETs be built into the next generation of AI, where the most sensitive data and the strongest case for protection often sit together? These are the questions we want to keep working on with those who joined us and the wider community.
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