Tiles/Data Collection
Current Status
In the current Firefox 33 and later prerelease builds, the following information is sent to Mozilla about tiles:
On viewing the new-tab page, blocking a tile, clicking a tile or an associated sponsored link, pinning or unpinning a tile, the following information is sent:
History tiles
- the position of the tile
- the pin status of the tile
- the tile frecency
- No tile ID or URL information is sent for history tiles
Directory and Enhanced tiles
the information for history tiles, plus
- The tile ID (which encodes the tile destination)
- A signal (empty string; no url) that the tile is enhanced
Other Details
A previous version of these patches would send the full URL for enhanced tiles. This URL submission has been removed.
The data is sent via a SSL connection. Key-pinning this connection is tracked by bug 1030135. No extra tracking cookies are set by the server for this ping.
When the data is received, the IP address is geo-encoded: the IP address is not stored on Mozilla’s servers.
Descriptions for the payload schemas for the pings can be found here
Prospecting Future Tile Partners
In addition to continuous data collection required for partners, we also want to collect information about current user history tiles, to provide business guidance about which sites are most valuable to our users for picking both Directory and Enhanced Tiles.
Proposal:
- Run a limited-time experiment in the beta channel to collect information about the top history site information.
- Rather than sending any URLs, prepare in advance a potential list of top sites or partners as a whitelist of sites. Only send information about tiles on this whitelist, and only send the TLD+2, not the full URL. This will avoid sending many kinds of personal URLs.
This prospecting experiment is tracked in bug 1062708