976344 - Privacy-Technical Review: True geolocation fields in Mozillians

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org :: Security Assurance: Review Request, task)

Description

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Initial Questions:

Project/Feature Name: True geolocation fields in Mozillians
Tracking  ID:920651
Description:
Mozillians.org currently stores location data in user profiles in strings. This means we can't do some of the most interesting, most requested things that geographic data allows. For example, we can't really plot Mozillians on a map, or produce accurate metrics, since all we have is a bunch of string data.

In particular, we might have people living in any/all of these places:
Newyork
New York City
NYC
NY City
etc.

This project will simply replace those string fields with true geographic data fields, which will normalize the data and make possible some features that users have long requested (like being able to indicate on a map that all of those people live in the same place).

The only reason I'm filing this bug is to alert the privacy team to this change and field any questions they have.
Additional Information:

Key Initiative: 10x increase in contributors
Release Date: 2014-03-31
Project Status: development
Mozilla Data: Yes
Mozilla Related: Mozillians.org
Separate Party: No

Comment 1

[Curtis Koenig [:curtisk-use curtis.koenig+bzATgmail.com]]]

Given that Mozillians is opt-in is it fair to suppose location data will be a further opt-in?

Comment 2

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

(In reply to Curtis Koenig [:curtisk] from comment #1)
> Given that Mozillians is opt-in is it fair to suppose location data will be
> a further opt-in?

As conceived we'd leave this aspect unchanged: 

1) Country is required. Region/city are not.
2) All fields can be managed with per-field privacy levels (visible publicly, visible to mozillians only)

Comment 3

[Curtis Koenig [:curtisk-use curtis.koenig+bzATgmail.com]]]

Given that all this is opt-in I see no reason for a technical side here. We may want to review the code to make sure there are not gotchas and of course the standard privacy review will have to happen but this one can be closed and opened.