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Privacy budget for business identification companies #15

Open hilarywsr opened 3 years ago

hilarywsr commented 3 years ago

Hi

The marketing division of our company uses a reverse IP address solution to identify the businesses that are visiting our website. The solution never identifies individuals and only identifies businesses that have 10 or more employees. The only information we receive is the name of the company and details about that business such as industry, revenue etc. Our vendor has also confirmed that they only capture the IP address of the visitor and no other points of entropy that would allow an individual to be fingerprinted.

Is this a use case that will be permitted to capture the IP address? Would a trust token or similar be issued for this purely B2B use case?

Thank you H

WilliamOConnell commented 2 years ago

I don't think there's anything a browser can do to prevent you from knowing your visitors' IP address. As it says in the proposal:

Some fingerprinting surfaces, such as UA string, IP addresses, and accept-language header, are passive in that they are available to every website whether they ask for them or not. For the purposes of privacy budget accounting, we will have to assume that each of these are being consumed by the site and therefore eat into the budget.

hilarywsr commented 2 years ago

I don't think there's anything a browser can do to prevent you from knowing your visitors' IP address. As it says in the proposal:

Some fingerprinting surfaces, such as UA string, IP addresses, and accept-language header, are passive in that they are available to every website whether they ask for them or not. For the purposes of privacy budget accounting, we will have to assume that each of these are being consumed by the site and therefore eat into the budget.

Thanks @WilliamOConnell . But what about the gnatcatcher proposal? This will surely stop them from accessing the IP address.

WilliamOConnell commented 2 years ago

That's a separate proposal from my understanding. It routes requests through third-party NAT servers to hide user's IP addresses. Pretty much the whole point of that is to stop IP addresses from leaking information about a user's identity, and that would include where they work. So I doubt there would be a exception made for your use case (and honestly those types of lead gathering systems always seemed kind of sketchy to me). But yeah that's a discussion for the other repo.