Privacy is tough to get right. It's a complicated concept involving laws, social norms and user expectations. The developer of an app, site, page, or add-on that takes privacy seriously inspires user trust. We've put together these guidelines to help you make a privacy-conscious app, and write a good privacy policy for it. Please remember that this is not a substitute for a real lawyer and doesn't provide legal advice.
Privacy policies
A privacy policy is a description of what you do with data about people. One should be provided where your app does anything with data about your users. The critical things to describe in the policy are how you and your app collect, use, store, and share or disclose information about people. Providing a privacy policy also helps your users understand what happens to information about them.
Different places around the world have specific requirements for how user data is collected, used, stored and disclosed. In some territories it may be a legal requirement to provide a privacy policy. You definitely need to talk to a lawyer to help you navigate the world of privacy and make a privacy policy that tells your users what they need to know.
Mozilla Marketplace privacy requirements
If your app does anything with data about your users, you're required to provide a privacy policy for your app in Firefox Marketplace.
If your app doesn't collect, use, store, and share or disclose any information about people, simply enter "This application doesn't collect, use, store, and share or disclose any information about the user or any other person." in the Marketplace Privacy Policy field.
Privacy tips for designing apps
- Design your app or add-on so that what you actually do with user data is what users think you are doing with it.
- Try to give the user as much control over their data as you can, such as giving them the choice to opt-in to or opt-out of data collection whenever possible.
- Try to limit your data collection and use to only the data that you need.
- Design your app and service to protect the security of your user's data in its collection, storage, and use.
- Respond to user questions and concerns about your privacy practices.
- Avoid 'secret' updates.
- Make your use of social features transparent, so that users are aware of when they're sharing data socially.
- Give people a way to turn off automatic sharing or make more granular choices about sharing data.
- Obtain consent from users when necessary, especially for location and other sensitive information.
- Put a link to your privacy policy and, if you have them, your "terms of use" somewhere in your app.
Additional Resources
These resources may be useful in assisting with the creation of your privacy policy. These links are not affiliated with Mozilla — they are provided for your information.
Privacy policy generators
Privacy policy templates
- HTML privacy policy template — GitHub hosted template, check out the README to get started.