Hello everyone
I'm so glad to see all of you here today
Like what our Taipei VP, Stan
mentioned just now
in Southeast Asia,
we need
a lot of user data, or rather, to collect user data
to help our product
make the best decisions and implement strategies
In processes as such, I'm sure many have heard of
our partners right in front here.
Firstly, let's introduce
the main topic with many things revolve around
and that is privacy security
That's one of Mozilla's core essence
But then, how do we
collect user data
and at the same time, ensure that
users' privacy are well protected?
Our core topic for the discussion today,
which is, how do we
collect user data
and how do we decide what and which data to collect
and following that, how are those data collected used?
Before collecting data,
we need to ask ourselves ten questions.
These ten questions,
such as, why do we need to collect these data?
or, where would we use these data collected?
or, are there any feasible alternatives
to collect these data?
In addition, will the existing methods
be sufficient to collect such data?
Do we need to evaluate the possibilities
of using alternative methods
to obtain these data?
Will these processes bring about other privacy issues?
Thereafter, upon listing all the data needed
they will roughly be categorised
into four types of data that we set
At the same time, these types also mean or demonstrate
the prediction of whether these data can be collected or not
We'll talk about these four types in a bit
they basically can represent what kind of data,
and for some data, upon collection,
how long will we store it for,
as for some data, we only need it for awhile,
but for some data, we would love to keep them for longer periods
to observe the change in those data
Therefore, we need to identify how long we have to store these data for
Following this,
these data, from where do we hope
to collect these data from?
and from these users,
do they have the ability to decide
if they do not wish to be part of the data collection
And lastly, how do we use
or analyse these data
and
will we
give these data to other partners
to share
These ten questions will then constitute
a centre to protect Mozilla's core essence; privacy
We mentioned that users' data
can be categorised into four main types
The very first, as you can see
technical data
These are installed by users into their mobiles
or computers
These computer equipment or CPU
will sometimes help us to realise
the problems that user face in our product
and the versions of our product
which is Firefox
This program version that we installed
it can help us
differentiate, let's just say that an issue happened today
which version had the bigger portion of issues?
These data, predicts our option,
our hope to collect these data
because these data has no way to
know who you are,
and where your location is
Therefore, these data
can help us, and improve our users
The second type of data is interaction data
These data include
the way users
use Firefox.
For instance, if today a user
clicks on "Back", this button here,
or when he clicks on context menu
right clicks on this interface, we would see a dropdown list.
Now what's operating in this list
actually implies if the design of our list
can really help the user.
Therefore, such interactive data
would be scattered to the user interface
of many users, where they can see it
Data like these, we would usually opt for collection
but the user can choose
if he does not want to be part of the data collection
He can choose
to turn it off.
In the third type, because Firefox
is an open source web platform
and on such platforms,
we'll face a lot of compatibility issues.
Because of such compatibility issues,
sometimes to find and remove errors
and to find these webpages or sites,
or design related issues,
or even if it's our engine's issues,
we have to, under some circumstances,
collect users' data
based on the information related to the sites visited.
Because these information are highly
related to content users' are interested in,
and not just
on the interface, or simply related to Firefox only
so to a certain extent,
it would infringe on a user's privacy.
For information as such, we will
opt out of collection
and only when, for instance, if Firefox faces an issue today,
causing it to crash, and we will have
a dialog box popping out to say
"would you like to send a report on the current website
for us to further analyse?"
Like that, only under circumstances
where a user agrees, will we then collect
the information regarding the site, how does it look like.
And at the last, the fourth type,
which is highly sensitive data
where these data can possibly
be directly used to find out your identity
because it might possibly be an email address from a Firefox account
Under these circumstances, it's usually to
enable us to further assist the users.
When they use a Firefox account
and face any issues
we will need to know their email address
and then only can we tackle
or provide advanced, personalised assistance.
So under these circumstances, we will set
this fourth type of data, as the highest level.
As we mentioned
the ten questions and four types of data,
next, we will begin
writing codes, embedding
pins, or rather, probes.
Of course not yet.
All we did just now,
at the beginning, was to take these questions
and categorised them. But next,
after sorting out these questions,
we have to pass them on to our Data Peer.
At Mozilla, we have our data sorting
personnel, they will help us review
and see if these questions have been properly answered,
and if we don't characterise these questions clearly,
they'd be our very important first line of defence.
They will review the contents of our questions,
and after reviewing,
if there's really anything related to
issues regarding users' privacy,
they will have to convey this to
different teams within Mozilla to reconfirm
if these parts have any privacy or legal related issues tied to them
and where we have to make adjustments to
the accuracy of the data we collect.
And after all these problems have been solved,
we will take these ten questions
and the four types of data and turn it into
a different format, which is
data spec In data spec,
we'll be clear to define
what the data can do, or to check the database,
and what the data's ID would be.
As this part is mainly our BI team's responsibility,
so that they can help us
write queries.
So in this part,
we need to reflect this process, from its original issue
to the product, which is actual and in real-life
Operationally, for every pin we embed,
it refers to events
and after we change it to specs
then only can we
start coding, and put all these items in.
Certainly,
it won't be sufficient to just implant
all these probes into the code
because at Mozilla
we hope that all our information
are open, so that users know
that their willingness to be part of
to change plans like that,
just what are they contributing to.
For programs like these, the actual operations on app versions
and its documentations
will usually have differences.
This is also where we mentioned that
very often, whenever we are
coding
we'll usually need to update these two items with differences
They usually are
and here
as we mainly code mobile applications
we basically use Java
and using Java's annotation processor we process our source code.
Every time
we write a new program, we hope to add a pin
whenever it's doing something or in idle state,
and using a model like this, we take the necessary information
write them all in the annotation function
Like that,
when program codes are being produced,
it will automatically take these results
and reflect them on a document. And this document,
will be available in our source code.
So that the user can
evolve by versions, in the existing code
and be aware of the latest updates
of what data is being collected from the app.
Because of such data collection processes,
between versions or major updates,
the evolution of these versions, we can even
differentiate them,
we can list out a huge database
to tell us
which version from the past till present
just which data that
has been collected before
and we make a directory like this
to tell users,
if you want to find out what kind of information are available
you can also find it inside the website.
Of course, Mozilla does hope that most data are open
So it's not just simply searching like that,
we also have public data report
where you'll find very interesting things in there
and it allows users and developers
to see if there's anything there that can help
our product improve.
That's my sharing for today
that includes the methods on
how do we handle users' data
and ensure their privacy.
And here's all the links to information mentioned
Alright
Thank you everyone.