1421840 - MMA: User attribute - when a user opens a private tab

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for iOS :: General, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Jean Collings]

To get a better understanding of how our in-app messaging campaigns are performing, we would like to track when a user opens a private tab as a user attribute. 

I was told we already do this in Telemetry. 

Use case:
As part of onboarding, show a user a banner about private browsing. The deeplink would direct users to opening a new private tab. 

We currently do not have a way to track if users are actually completing this goal.

Comment 1

[Jean Collings]

Chenxia and Elvin - please let me know how we should proceed with a review of this.

Comment 2

[Elvin Lee [:ellee] (no longer with Mozilla)]

Hi Jean, my understanding is that we do NOT track this in Android or Desktop. We therefore shouldn't be tracking in iOS either. This is neither a legal nor a policy/compliance [Marshall] interpretation, but rather Firefox product team's statement of how Private Browsing mode should behave as a feature.

Please see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325323 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1216265

Comment 3

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Agree with Elvin, opening private browsing tabs is not something that we track, so to proceed, you'd have to make a case for why going beyond the expectations we've set for private browsing is worth the data that we'd be collecting here. Specifically for Android and Desktop, the requirement is that this can't be persisted even locally to disk - I think the case for sending this to a third party would have to demonstrate an even greater need.

"The browser should make it difficult for a website to tell if it is in a private window. Without this level of protection, the websites in the example in the above section could communicate with each other and leak information through their common server - the website in the private window can transmit the sensitive information, and the other instance could retrieve it at a later time. Ideally, the server should have a difficult time determining if one of these instances is using private browsing mode. There are also UX reasons why users may not want the websites that they are visiting in private mode to be aware of that fact. "

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Private_Browsing

Comment 4

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Chenxia, Elvin, how about we keep a user attribute that has nothing more then "user has used private browsing in the past". So it would not be an event that fires when a tab opens, but an attribute that is set once, without being more specific.

Comment 5

[Elvin Lee [:ellee] (no longer with Mozilla)]

As I said in my comment 2, this is up to Firefox product in the first instance, so I defer to :liuche.

Comment 6

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

An update from a data stewards meeting: we still should not collect any information about whether a user has ever used private browsing.

I'm going to close this bug because this is not something we can collect under our current privacy policy. If this is still something that you want to pursue, please talk to Marshall/legal and see if that's something that we could change in the privacy policy.

Comment 7

[Jean Collings]

That's fine with me, thanks!