1421422 - Collect "region" and "profile_creation_date" for AS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, enhancement, P1)

Comment 1

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

1. What questions will you answer with this data?
  * profile_creation_date: to understand the age of Activity Stream users' profile, which allows us to identify the new users and existing users among different Firefox versions.
  * region: to investigate certain geo related issues, for instance, the top stories feature was disabled if the region was unset or unknown. 

2. Why does Mozilla need to answer these questions? Are there benefits for users? Do we need this information to address product or business requirements?
This helps us understand if current user regions are set correctly, which improves the overall quality of recommendation content in Activity Stream. 

3. What alternative methods did you consider to answer these questions? Why were they not sufficient?
There is no current instrumentation of this important value. 

4. Can current instrumentation answer these questions?
There is no current instrumentation of this important value.

5. List all proposed measurements and indicate the category of data collection for each measurement, using the Firefox data collection categories on the found on the Mozilla wiki.
  * profile_creation_date is of category 1
  * region is of category 2 data (information about where the user’s machine sits). It is most similar to locale, in that it is a vague geo preference that does not leak the user’s location. However the measurement of region is a different one from locale, and region is used in important features in Activity Stream like Top Stories.

6. How long will this data be collected? Choose one of the following:
Permanently.

7. What populations will you measure?
All Firefox channels, all countries ,all locales. 

8. Please provide a general description of how you will analyze this data.
General reporting on Redash. 

9. Where do you intend to share the results of your analysis?
This is shared over Mozilla LDAP via Redash.

Comment 2

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

Hi Rebecca, could you pick up the data review for this as :francois is on PTO until late January?

The patch and review is being tracked on Github: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3877

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

:nanj, I will check in with :merwin about where this was left off with Francois out.  It appears like there are still details around search region that need to be clarified.

Comment 4

[Merwin]

Summary of our discussion earlier about this....We can collect this data but need to aggregate the countries with small user populations together to mitigate the privacy risk and to ensure that users in countries with small populations cannot be uniquely identified. We discussed whether to do this based on country population or user population in particular countries based on particular countries and decided that user population would better address the risk. We decided on a threshold of 10,000 below which the users would go into the "other" bucket rather than be identified by specific country.

Comment 5

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3929

Comment 6

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

We've updated the patch per the request of Comment 4.

The document change:

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3877/files

The code change:

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3929

:merwin, could you take another look?

Comment 7

[Merwin]

This looks good.  The whitelist approach makes sense to me.  I'm assuming we did the quick analysis to generate the list we've included.

Comment 8

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

(In reply to Merwin from comment #7)
> This looks good.  The whitelist approach makes sense to me.  I'm assuming we
> did the quick analysis to generate the list we've included.

Yes, the whitelist was generated from all the sources available in the organization.

Comment 9

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/c1ee26d4c259577de8d23887ccfe08ec4ec5a361
Fix Bug 1421422 - Add a region whitelist for PingCentre

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/22ea49004e9584add780db7ac032dd96dc8f464b
Merge pull request #3929 from ncloudioj/bz1421422

Fix Bug 1421422 - Add a region whitelist for PingCentre

Comment 10

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/6597eb5ccb505a18766f30318ba32e100ab7775a
Merge pull request #3877 from ncloudioj/gh3876

Fix Bug 1421422 - Collect "region" and "profile_creation_date" for AS

Comment 11

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0d163e2c4792

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

Removing the NI for me as Marshall cleared this.