Google Location Service in Mozilla Firefox Privacy Policy

April 24, 2009

The Google Privacy Policy generally describes how we treat personal information when you use Google’s products and services. In addition, the following describes the privacy practices specific to the Google Location Service that provides geolocation information to the Mozilla Firefox Geolocation Feature. In case of a conflict or ambiguity between the two policies, this policy will prevail.

Websites, including other Google products and services, may use other unrelated geolocation services to locate you. Please refer to those other websites’ and services’ privacy policies for further privacy information.

Information we collect

• If you allow a website to get your location via this service, we will collect, depending on the capabilities of your device, information about the wifi routers closest to you, cell ids of the cell towers closest to you, and the strength of your wifi or cell signal. We use this information to return an estimated location to the Firefox browser and the Firefox browser sends the estimated location to the requesting website. For each request sent to our service, we also collect IP address, user agent information, and unique identifier of your client. We use this information to distinguish requests, not to identify you.

Uses

• We use all the information above to process the Firefox geolocation requests. We also use all the information above to operate, support, and improve the overall quality of the Google Location Service.
• Information collected above will be anonymized and aggregated before being used by Google to develop new features or products and services, or to improve the overall quality of any of Google’s other products and services. This means that your IP address and unique identifier of your client will be stripped out before being used by any of Google’s other products or features.

Information sharing and onward transfer

In addition to the sharing and onward transfer disclosed in the Google Privacy Policy:

• This service allows websites to access your location if you opt-in to use the Firefox Geolocation Feature. If the website is a non-Google website, we do not have control over the website or its privacy practices. Please carefully consider any website’s privacy practices before consenting to share your location with that website.
• All requests must be sent through your internet service provider or mobile carrier network and your service provider or carrier may have access to the request. For information regarding your service provider’s or carrier’s treatment of your information, please consult their privacy policies.
• This product works on the Firefox browser . For information regarding Mozilla’s privacy practices, please consult the Firefox privacy policy.

Your choices

• The Firefox Geolocation Feature will make requests to Google only if you tell the feature to do so. For information about your choices, please consult the Firefox privacy policy.

More information

Google adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce’s web site.

For more information about our privacy practices, go to the full privacy policy. For questions concerning the product or your account, please check out the Google Help page.