Gang!
I wanted to take a few minutes today and discuss how the Unfiltered Search Engine manages data privacy, what data is retained, why, how long etc. Most likely this post will get reviewed and updated as the application changes. So if you are interested in this topic book mark this post!
This post will cover the following topics:
- What Unfiltered does with your data
- What data collection tools are installed on the store application
- Tracking on the website & blog
What Unfiltered does with your data
Unfiltered collects data as you move around the application regardless of the platform. This information is used to review the usage of the application. The device identifier is ran through a data anonymization process to obfuscate it. This gives the UI teams here at Unfiltered the ability to see how the application is being used without being able to identify who the users are. It is important to note the data anonymization takes place on the application and not the server. This means we can’t change the code on the server and see the non-anonymized data.
Unfiltered also allows users to create any number of personalized searches and search groups. See this post for more details on this. This ability to create searches means that we have to have a user record for you. This allows the server to know what searches belong to you. You can either use a ‘Social Sign On’ for Google, Apple, Microsoft or create an account using Unfiltered. This process is used to weed out bot accounts.
Once your account is created you can delete it at anytime. The delete process removes your user record and any searches. This data is not placed in a ‘recycle bin’ or preserved in any fashion. It is just deleted. We don’t care about it. It is important to note that we do not monetize saved searches in any way. No analysis is performed on this data. We don’t care what you are searching about. We just care about giving you different ways to search for data.
What data collection tools are installed?
The store application does not use any out of the box tracking APIs. Initially Google Analytics really peeked my interest as a tool to see how the application is being utilized. However after digging into what that provided to Unfiltered and what it took from the user I decided to write what was needed. So I pulled the analytic APIs out of the code stack. I was not happy with what I found was going on with store applications and tracking via analytic tools. As noted above we do track movement inside the application with a home spun, properly data anonymized, code solution that we wrote.
Tracking on the website and blog
The website and blog still use Google Analytics. This will be replaced in the future. I just haven’t had time to replace this. The website is a SPA. The important take away from this is the application is only browsed to once when it is opened. New pages are not browsed to as the application is navigated through. So the level of effort to pull Google Analytics out is small. The blog is a larger body of work. Just takes time…
That’s a wrap!
Hopefully this post will clear up how Unfiltered manages data privacy and the steps that we are taking to anonymize it and outlining how you control it. As usual please email us at: blog@unfiltered.me with any questions or drop a comment.
Happy searching with the Unfiltered Search Engine!
