03 Jul 2026

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Mozilla Privacy Blog: Mozilla Mornings comes to the UK: privacy-enhancing technologies and the questions they raise

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 Oblivious HTTP, differential privacy, the Distributed Aggregation Protocol and DNS over HTTPS.

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 investing in and building around privacy-preserving advertising, recognising that PETs are not a silver bullet but an important part of a better model.

Responsible deployment of PETs depends not only on the technical design, but also on the governance, assurance, and market context around it. PETs should be grounded in open standards and interoperable architectures. Otherwise, they risk reinforcing walled gardens, limiting choice or creating new dependencies rather than supporting a more open and competitive ecosystem.

The discussion

The event opened with remarks from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). This included the ICO's work on PETs, online tracking, privacy-preserving attribution and the questions raised under Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Shortly before the event, the ICO had published advice 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.

The post Mozilla Mornings comes to the UK: privacy-enhancing technologies and the questions they raise appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

03 Jul 2026 10:36am GMT

01 Jul 2026

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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 658

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

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Updates from Rust Community

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Crate of the Week

This week's crate is deconvolution, a image deconvolution and restoration library.

Thanks to pbkx for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

multicalc - good first issues

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

426 pull requests were merged in the last week

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Rust Compiler Performance Triage

Overall, the week was fairly neutral, with no meaningful shift on most benchmarks on any of our statistics.

Triage done by @simulacrum. Revision range: 8b6558a0..7dc2c162

2 Regressions, 1 Improvement, 7 Mixed; 5 of them in rollups 34 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

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Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-07-01 - 2026-07-29 🦀

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If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

I do rather hope anyone using -Zllvm-target-features or any stabilized form thereof would know that they are getting a conversation with the dragon directly and they should mind their words carefully if they do not wish to be barbecued by it and served over a nice plate of iron filings.

- workingjubilee on rust zulip

Thanks to Tomáš Šedovič for the suggestion!

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Discuss on r/rust

01 Jul 2026 4:00am GMT

Firefox Tooling Announcements: Happy BMO Push Day! (20260630.1)

Github Link

The following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:

Discuss these changes in the BMO Matrix Room

1 post - 1 participant

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01 Jul 2026 12:55am GMT