On Mar 27, 2015, at 12:42 PM, marwen.doukh <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi, great questions! > I'm a contributor in MLS , but I have some questions like : > -Who can guarantee that Mozilla will use this service in a good way and not > to spy on us? (I read the privacy policy, but I want something more "real") We try to do what's right, but each person's idea of what constitutes a "good way" may differ, so making a guarantee would be disingenuous. I will say that I personally have little interest in working on a project that seeks to track user locations in real-time and we're not doing that. What we *can* do is show you what we do with our data. All the code that we use to collect the data, both on the server and client side is open-source and can be inspected. So, for example you can verify that we don't send user-trackable data (each report from a user has a different id), and you can see that at no point are we doing anything that looks like user tracking. There is a field for providing email, but that's used for leaderboards, is entirely optional (and defaults to blank), and doesn't get included in the stored data. > -Why not use the Google location service instead of building a new DB ? There are several reasons. First of all, there's no guarantee that Google will always continue to let us use their database. One day they could deny access, leaving users of Firefox with a suboptimal experience. Building our own location service protects us from that possibility, and since we need to do that, we should try to do it in the most Mozilla-ish way possible. Secondly, Google (and a few other large companies) control these databases and treat them as proprietary. We don't think that should be the case; this data represents a substantial barrier to small companies who have great ideas in the geolocation space and we'd like to find a way to enable those companies to create an improved geolocation ecosystem. Will some of those companies do things you don't like? Almost certainly, but so will Google. If we're successful, you'll have a choice not to use the ones you don't like. Finally, we see this as a great opportunity for community collaboration and sharing. Mozilla was built on these principles and this dovetails with our mission. > -How can we be sure that Mozilla is committed to protect our privacy? I'd like to think that we demonstrate this commitment by doing, and that we've been doing it since the company was founded. You can read about the mission behind the company here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ - item 4 should be of particular relevance: "Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional." Happy to answer any followup questions you might have. Regards, Toby _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
