875554 - Update websites privacy policy for FxOS website geolocation

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Privacy Graveyard :: Privacy Policies, task)

Description

[Mike Alexis [:malexis]]

Similar to geo-snippets and marketplace we are going to use geolocation to serve content per location for FFOS website.

For this first round (the teaser page) we'll be doing the geolocation client-side. This will involve the page including a script tag to "http://geo.mozilla.org/country.js" which will use the connecting client's IP address to return a country code. We'll then use that country code to show/hide elements on the screen based on the current offers or lack thereof in the user's country.

Geolocation bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=867326

Comment 1

[Stacy Martin [:stacy]]

Hi Mike,

Are we planning to use the info for anything else?   

For example, with Snippets, we said "Aside from providing you with the snippets service, we use the information from these requests to estimate what fraction of Firefox users click on each snippet (broken down into general categories like Firefox version and geographic area)."

Would we want to estimate the fraction of website users who respond to each offer?

Comment 2

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Stacy Martin [:stacy] from comment #1)
> Hi Mike,
> 
> Are we planning to use the info for anything else?   
> 
> For example, with Snippets, we said "Aside from providing you with the
> snippets service, we use the information from these requests to estimate
> what fraction of Firefox users click on each snippet (broken down into
> general categories like Firefox version and geographic area)."
> 
> Would we want to estimate the fraction of website users who respond to each
> offer?

The first use-case is Firefox OS content on www.mozilla.org, but I assume in the future we may have another use for it. It is hard to say the estimated traffic to this section of the website has it has never existed and it depends on how much interest there is in Firefox OS.

Comment 3

[Stacy Martin [:stacy]]

Thank you, Chris.  For now, I'll leave that section out of the privacy policy then.  Does this seem to describe the geolocation correctly?  This would be added to Mozilla's general website privacy policy.

To help display relevant content, some of our websites may send Mozilla a request to look up your location at a country level using your IP address. You can test this yourself by visiting http://geo.mozilla.org/country.json.  The browser (not our web servers) will then pick content to show you based on the country information, but does not store it for future use.  

Draft is located at: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/document/d/1m7csRi1M2ucsAyyrEimpBvkrhnRsdva--y-o0PfuT_E/edit 

Note: I've added page to track all geolocation projects I'm aware of at:

https://intranet.mozilla.org/Privacy/Geolocation

How the data flow works: (from pmac)

User requests web page -> script on page requests geo info from geo.m.o
-> browser calls to geo.m.o which returns country code (e.g. "UK") ->
script on page uses that data to show and/or hide location appropriate
content but does NOT store it for future use. The mozilla.org servers
never know the geo information.

The trick is that this is how we're doing it now, but it could change
for future pages which could be significantly more complex. Other
proposed solutions would be more like what marketplace does, which is
to have our server do the geo lookup and then serve them only the
location appropriate content. This is very different from a privacy
standpoint because our server would be correlating their IP address
with a country and potentially storing that in a log. Mozillia.org is
_NOT_ currently doing this, but it's not outside the realm of
possibility for future.

Comment 4

[Stacy Martin [:stacy]]

Update:  We had created the following language:

To help display relevant content, some of our websites may send Mozilla a request to look up your location at a country level using your IP address. You can test this yourself by visiting http://geo.mozilla.org/country.json.  Mozilla’s servers will not store your location for any future uses.

However, in talking to Jishnu, he doesn't think we need to do an update afterall.  Here's our discussion:

Me: We tell people for Snippets that we're geolocating, but you don't think we need to explain it when we serve them a web page with phone providers in their country?  It seems very similar to me.

Jishnu: Snippets are in the browser and its more suprising we would use IP
address whereas this is a web page - it's about
user expectations. Also, we've got broader language about collecting IP
addresses in the main website privacy policy.

I think we can go ahead and close this bug out as resolved with no action needed, unless anyone has any concerns.

Comment 5

[Chris More [:cmore]]

+1 to not having to do anything. This is not the Firefox product and it is probably covered in the broader language as Jishnu mentioned.