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>The collaboration with academics and journalists is important

It's not important to me.

Projects like this make me want to choose a browser other than Mozilla.

Yeah, that's fair! My view is not that everybody should use Rally, or even Firefox. Rather, it's that even though there's going to be massive filtering going on with regards to who will even contribute data to Rally, it's still going to benefit the public to have biased quantitative estimates of parameters of interest, and to surface qualitative findings from the group of people who do contribute.

It's always possible in the future that Rally, or other initiatives, will find other ways to incentivize contributions (more projects that align with specific interests, more "visualization" of how your data contributions might impact the world, etc.).

As to whether the cost-benefit accounting (producing new knowledge, informing design vs. scaring users off Firefox, creating new privacy harms) will come out in favor of the project remains to be seen, of course!

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