We have a Firefox Privacy Policy, but in a quick search through the Firefox menu items, neither Julie nor I could find a link to that Privacy Policy. Are we looking in the wrong place or is there no link in FF to the Privacy Policy? If not, that's something that needs to be fixed. Off the top of my head, a couple of options are to have the link in the Help menu in Windows versions, the equivalent menu in Mac versions, or in the About Mozilla Firefox box. It is important to provide easy access to the privacy policy in the product.

there's help -> about -> link: licensing information what opens "about:license". in the first line there's a "Know your rights" link what points to "about:rights". and there's a placeholder paragraph (the 2nd) stating "Any applicable privacy policies for this product should be listed here." as of yet ;-).

Thanks. It's good to know there is a link, but I think it's too many clicks down. Julie M - What do you think?

I agree. It would be nice to have a first level link.

It's a question for our UX team. CC'ing Alex who was already working on getting feedback about the usage of some menu elements which are used less often. I think that's another one. With first level link you mean we should put it not in the menu but directly in the about window?

I don't think it's appropriate to put this in a menu. I'm fine with this going in the About dialog, though it's getting pretty crowded in there!

Yeah, sounds like something that should be in the About dialog, which needs redoing anyway, imho.

In another bug (536336) it was decided to change the text in the About dialog for FF 4 by removing the copyright notice. A proposal for the revised text is in comment 36 in bug 568659. With this shortening of the text, hopefully adding a link to the privacy policy won't make it too crowded. I don't know if anything else is being added. Here's a revised proposal for the text: "</a>Licensing Information</a>. </a>Firefox Privacy Policy</a>. Firefox and the Firefox logos are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. Some of the trademarks used under license from The Charlton Company."

I concur that this belongs in the about dialog. If we are editing that string, perhaps also think about bug 571424 ?

(In reply to comment #8) > I concur that this belongs in the about dialog. If we are editing that string, > perhaps also think about bug 571424 ? Let's be clear - in bug 536336 we're just adding the required text about Charlton Company and backporting, not spending a lot of time editing the string, nor should we add the link to the privacy policy as part of that bug. For Firefox 4 we can do some rephrasing of the About Box, but we wouldn't back-port that to 3.6.x. I don't think we should conflate these things. Let's fix them one at a time.

>I don't think we should conflate these things yep, didn't realize we were back porting

To be clear from my side, I haven't been suggesting changes to the About dialog for versions before 4.0 other than the Charlton thing (which you've already done). Of course, if it becomes necessary to change the About dialog for earlier releases for some other unforeseen reason, it would be nice to have the addition of a privacy policy link and dropping of the copyright notice included.

I noticed a few things in Firefox 4 beta 1 with respect to the about box, but the one that's relevant to this bug is that if you can find the about box, there's no link to the Firefox privacy policy in it. Is there a plan to add a link to the privacy policy there or elsewhere in the product as discussed above?

Not sure I understand your comment 12, Liz. Are you simply noting that nothing had been done yet on this bug? For this bug to move forward we need an assignee and presumably a design. There's a bunch of changes that I think need to be made to the About Box, not sure who's marshalling them, but I know the UX team keeps an eye on all bugs marked uiwanted like this one, so I presume that it will be gotten to. (Do you think that this is an issue which we *must* resolve before shipping? If so, change the value of the blocking2.0: field to "?".)

It is important that someone using Firefox be able to easily find the applicable privacy policy. In current versions that isn't the case. Julie and I would like to make sure it is true for the release version of 4.0. I agree that there other improvements that could be made to the About Box and Legal would like to review it before it's finalized. I changed the value of the blocking2.0: field to "?" and amended the title of the bug. Do I need to do anything else to get this bug assigned or should I just have faith it will be fixed in one of the upcoming beta releases?

Liz: having trouble reading tone from your comment, but to me you sound upset and frustrated. Hopefully that isn't the case. I know what this bug is about - that was clear in comment 0. I suspect comment 12 was basically "has there been any action on this bug yet?" to which the answer is "no, there has not been" (sidenote: we try as much as possible to not overlap bugs, so while yes, there have been other bugs on the topic of changes to the About Firefox box, none but this one will be used to address this particular issue). You do not need to do anything else to get this bug assigned, as I tried (unsuccessfully!) to indicate in comment 13. It's marked uiwanted, and now nominated for blocking, so those decisions will be made by the appropriate teams. This is not a guarantee, at this time, that it will make Firefox 4. So far I'm considering this a "nice to have," not a "must have." To date, I haven't seen strong enough rationale to block the release on this particular issue, though I agree that we should fix it. Do you feel like we can not release Firefox 4 without this change?

Hi, Mike and everyone on this bug. I wanted to join in this discussion as I do feel strongly about this and wanted to back up Liz here. We are legally required to have a privacy policy prominently displayed to users. And more importantly as a company that values transparency and openness it is the right thing to do. So given those two things I do not want to see us release FF 4.0 without a privacy policy that is displayed to users without a hunt. This should appear on the download page with a link to the page with the policy and a pdf link on that page. It should also be discoverable with no more than one step once users have already downloaded the product. The proposals above including the about box don't make this reasonably accessible. Although I'm happy to discuss further, I am not aware of a technical reason why this would need to turn into a blocker given the timing. Proposed solution: 1. let's assign this bug to a UX person who can implement the approach we agree on. 2. let's have a call with that person to find the right place to have the PP live.

Hey Julie - I'm not sure why Liz needs "backing up". I asked a question, and indicated that at no point had this been indicated to be a blocking issue until recently, and merely asked for some rationale and explanation. That's standard procedure. As you might imagine, there are many issues fighting for developer and user experience attention. I have also indicated (multiple times) that the bug is properly marked to be placed in the queue for attention from UX and product drivers. All that's needed is an explanation of why it's felt that now, at this time, this is an issue which should block our release. What would be helpful is some analysis and indication of where competitors place links to their privacy policies (I can't find one in Chrome or Safari, for example) or where you've seen prominent and informative links to privacy policies which you think are ideal. The current plan is to add it to the About Box - is that the best plan? We can work on the design, but that work will be better the more information we have. We're all on the same side - there's no need to be combative, here.

>uiwanted Let's put this in the About dialog. That will give it a consistent location across all platforms. For now we can create a new string for "Privacy Policy" and place it before licensing information: ----------------------------------------- version 4.0b2pre Privacy Policy. Licensing Information. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; en-US; rv:2.0b2pre) Gecko/20100714 Minefield/4.0b2pre ----------------------------------------- We may add some additional text later to lighten the tone of the dialog and mention that we are open source, but in the meantime we should get the string for "privacy policy" and land this change just in case. >What would be helpful is some analysis and indication of where competitors >place links to their privacy policies (I can't find one in Chrome or Safari, >for example) I could find one in IE. External consistency seems to be in general not to have one. Chrome added one to their options dialog, since it has a mapping there to turning off all of the privacy invasive features. We don't really have a part of our UI that contains controls to turn off privacy invasive features. About window seems the most logical place.

Alex: is there a meta-bug tracking all the planned refinements to the About Box? Do we want to do a full redesign of that dialog?

The concern we have about the about box placement is it seems hard to find in FF 4. Is its placement going to move from how it looks in the beta?

The About box will be accessible by the menu system, as it is now. On OSX that will be the application menu in the OSX Menu Bar. On Linux and Windows XP it will be the application menu bar at the top of the window (under "Help"). On Windows Vista and 7 it will be in the Firefox Button at the top left of the window.

>The concern we have about the about box placement is it seems hard to find in >FF 4. Is its placement going to move from how it looks in the beta? The about menu is currently inaccessible from the Firefox button (I'm actually not sure why), but the intended paths are: =Vista, 7= Firefox > Help > About =XP, 2000, OS X, Linux= Help > About We'll be sure to fix this in the next update of the Firefox button (the About window is also going to be the place where the user checks for updates). >Alex: is there a meta-bug tracking all the planned refinements to the About >Box? Do we want to do a full redesign of that dialog? filed the new meta bug 579547

Thanks. That makes a big difference. That just leaves the issue of getting a link in the download flow. Should we discuss that separately?

I talked to Alex about that. The pop-up box I pointed out to you won't work, so we're back to the download page. That's a different team, so we should file a different bug for that.

Okay. Thanks.

johnath, this needs an assignee

The assignee will come once bug 579547 is worked through, yeah. Please do file another bug (cc me, if you would!) for the link on the download page.

Just checking in to see whether progress has been made on adding a link to the Privacy Policy in the About Box.

We've got Margaret assigned and blocking+, so there is no need for concern :)

Fixed by bug 579547