Personal Data
Cookies
Cookies are used to store data for an application for re-use, such as login information so that the user doesn’t have to login every time they want to use the application. Initially in our application cookie use will be optional, as the user will be able to select if they want to be “remembered” for their login, and if so a cookie will be created to store their login details. Upon doing this the user will be informed that to use this option they must accept the use of a cookie to store this information. If our application progresses to using cookies in other places such as for advertising, or to remember event preferences then the standard cookie banner will be shown in the application, informing the user that our application uses cookies and that to keep using the site implies acceptance of this policy. The other way that cookies will be used in our application is to store events for users that don’t wish to create an account. Users who do not wish to create an account will have the option to “active events” that they are sent via a link. Upon activating the event the application will ask if the user wishes to store this event using cookies so that a record of their events can be stored on their computer and specific browser, ensuring continuity on using our application without needing to create an account. The cookie message in all cases will link to our privacy policy, which will also detail the users in how to remove our cookies if they wish.
Privacy Policy
Our privacy policy will state what data we are storing about a user. Our application, unlike many other social networking application isn’t centered around collecting masses of user data. The main pieces of data our social networking application wants to look at is, name and friends list, and that is the only data that will get stored on our application about each individual. This will be stated in our privacy policy. Our application offers login via Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, and again all it will request via those logins is name and friends list, and it will get the user to agree to those permissions [2].
Advertising & Data Privacy
Our social networking application will use advertising (unless you choose to purchase an advert free version). However, this advertising will NOT be based on stored user data, and data will NOT be passed along to any third parties. Advertising (as stated in our Business Model blog [3]) is not targeted towards the user, but is targeted towards the event, and will be shown to the attendees of certain events. E.g a restaurant based event might show adverts of offers for that restaurant, or similar restaurants near to that location. This is still targeted advertising towards the interest of the group, without targeting individuals, and this data will not be stored once the event has occurred.
Travel & Weather Data
Obtaining travel data could prove both challenging and expensive. If we locate some data that is flagged as “non commercial use” or “private use only” then clearly it cannot be used within our application and then distributed to the public. Additionally we may find that different data sets have different licenses, and then there rises the issue of how do these licenses combine? In order to combat this Koh.Tu.Me will be using entirely Open Data for it’s travel and weather data. Open data is licensed under the Open Government License [4] which means that it is free to use within our application, thus ensuring that not only would this save us money, but that we could use as much of the data as we wanted, in whatever way we need to.
References
[1] http://www.cookielaw.org/the-cookie-law/
[2] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions
[3] https://blog.soton.ac.uk/criticalmass/2014/03/12/business-model-jokha-sami/
[4] http://data.gov.uk/blog/new-open-government-license
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