Proposed changes to Mozilla’s privacy policy
April 15th, 2008 by bhashem
Last week, Mitchell outlined a series of guiding principles for the Mozilla organization regarding web sites, data and privacy.
She proposed we use a web analytics tool from Omniture to help us understand how users interact with our web properties. After considering feedback and any commentary, we’ve updated the privacy policy to support the use of this web analytics tool. The new policy conforms to the commitments laid out in the earlier discussion. Absent any major objections, we plan to update the policy as proposed and implement the 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 not in the picture. Only Omniture is under consideration. So, here are the relevant docs.
- Current policy (dated Dec 2007)
- Revised Policy (dated Apr 2008)
- An HTML diff between the Dec 2007 and the April 2008 versions
- A PDF diff between the Dec 2007 and the April 2008 versions
- A PDF diff between the Feb 2008 draft and the April 2008 version
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.
From http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3340686#3340686:
Basil, http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_Meeting_Notepad#April_9th: “I’ve posted to the very heated debate on MozillaZine, there are some reasoned replies coming thru now.”
There were reasoned replies long before you posted, Basil. You just needed to read between the disappointment and frustration. Please do your best to at least not patronise all your users.
Not sure if this has been mentioned here or elsewhere (and damned if I’m going to try and find it – due to the very issue I’m about to describe): communication for AMO is horribly fragmented:
* there are half a dozen personal blogs that I’ve encountered over the last few weeks which have each provided fragments of what is going on (and universally not responded in their comments threads about AMO 3.2 criticism)
* there’s Mozilla wiki ‘meeting notepad’ (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_Meeting_Notepad) which I just found
* there’s this forum (which I didn’t know was unofficial until I first posted in this thread)
* there’s bugzilla which exposes my email if I create an account – no, thanks. Bugzilla suggests I create a new email account just for bugzilla – yeah, right!
* there’s an IRC channel (so Mike Morgan tells us in a recent post on his personal blog). I don’t have time or inclination to set up and monitor IRC channels… and I think the same sentiment is felt by most users
* there’s http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/ which transmits a small subset of what appears on dev’s personal blogs
And none of these are linked from AMO, which makes it kinda tough for the ‘average’ user to know there’s a new version on the way – or where to go to provide feedback.
The massive addon community, user and dev, deserves better.
Solution: create an AMO blog, link it from AMO. Each person involved with AMO dev should post to the official blog and copy to their personal one, if they choose. This is the only solution that makes sense if you are genuinely committed to engaging with the people who use AMO.
Thanks for listening.
(Now I better cross-post this to your blog in case you don’t return to read it here!)