Candidate revisions to Mozilla’s web site privacy policy
February 8th, 2008 by bhashem
As mozilla.com (and our 20+ other sites such as AMO, MDC, etc…) have grown to be some of the top visited properties on the planet, we have maxed out the capabilities of our current web analytics solution. We needed to shift to a world-class, scalable option that has active development and innovative reporting and analytics. The new solution will help us better understand what our users are doing on our websites so that we can continuously improve their user experience.
Mozilla has selected Omniture and Google Analytics as additional web analytics solutions. The major difference between what Mozilla has today and these third-party solutions is that Omniture and Google Analytics are hosted web site services. In order to accommodate, we need to make some changes to our current website privacy policy, provide opt-out procedures and affect a minor change for SUMO’s Live Chat feature.
Below are the proposed changes to the mozilla.com privacy policy.
- Redlined markup of proposed changes (PDF format)
- Candidate new web site privacy policy & hosts file opt-out instructions
- Current web site privacy policy
Note that this policy change is only in effect for mozilla.com and associated web properties and does not change the existing Firefox privacy policy.
We encourage any questions, discussions and followups to the mozilla.governance mailing list and newsgroup.
Thanks.
[...] Greg wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpthave grown to be some of the top visited properties on the planet, we have maxed out the capabilities of our current web analytics solution. We needed to shift to a world-class, scalable option that has active development and innovative … [...]
Is there no suitable server-side option? I mean, Google Analytics is based on Urchin, which is server-side. Is it unsuitable for some reason?
@Toe: Actually, we have been using Urchin for quite some time. Due to our scale, we’ve had issues with overall availability, log processing issues and time to process the logs. Mozilla consulted with Urchin experts over many months to try to permanently resolve the problems but unfortunately the situation has not gotten any better.
From what we understand, Google has taken the Urchin base and have used that for building up Google Analytics feature development - as a consequence Urchin development is slowing down and will lag in features and support into the foreseeable future.
The Mozilla Metrics, Marketing, IT & OPS teams did an extensive evaluation and came up with Omniture and Google Analytics as the best solution for our needs.
[...] Die Mozilla Seiten gehören mittlerweile zu den meist besuchten der Welt. Um den Traffic analysierien zu können, mussten neue Tools installiert werden und deswegen änderte man die Privacy Policy. Mehr… [...]
[...] Mozilla’s websites have grown to be some of the top visited web sites in the world, and this massive increase in traffic has maxed out the capabilities of the current web analytics tools. New tools have been selected that will scale up to meet the new requirements, but are such that some changes to existing website privacy policies are required. Basil Hashem has blogged about the proposed changes and is seeking feedback from the Mozilla community. For more information, including links to the proposed changes and forums for providing feedback, please see Basil’s weblog. [...]
[...] web analytics tool immediately thereafter.Lest you think you are experiencing déjà vu, I indeed blogged about something similar back in February 2008 - the most notable difference this time around is that Google Analytics is [...]