Data Privacy In Showcase

October 01, 2022

As Showcase is embedded in sites all around the web, we work to minimize the amount of data we store in a visitor’s browser or collect with analytics. For instance, we will never add third-party “tracking” cookies in Showcase. To make the best product possible we still need to store and collect some data, but we want to be fully transparent about what data and why we need it.

Data stored in the browser

Showcase does not set or read any cookies for visitors that are not logged into a Matterport account. However, it does use Local Storage to store the following in a visitor’s browser:

  • User settings.

    When a visitor selects measurement units or dismisses a popup message, we store this to ensure that we give the user a good experience next time they look at a space.

Analytics

Showcase sends behavior analytics to our own analytics service so that the product team can better understand what users do in the application and improve it. This is important to ensure a good experience across all platforms, devices, browsers, and locations that Showcase is supposed to work in. Actions a user initiates in the app (e.g., clicking a button) are recorded and sent as a message to the analytics service.

For each message, the following metadata is stored from the user’s browser:

  • Anonymized IP (The last octet is always set to 0).

  • Which city and country the user is in, based on anonymized IP.

  • User agent string, which includes things such as browser, operating system, and device type.

  • Other device information such as screen size, date, time, time-zone, the browser language, graphics card type and graphics card metrics.

Logging

All HTTPS requests that Showcase sends end up being logged in one or more logging services. These logs are necessary to maintain the health and uptime of the application. Such logs have similar metadata to the analytics above.

Logged in users

If a user is logged into a Matterport account when using Showcase, a session cookie is used to give the user access to additional information available to them, e.g., a private space they have been given access to. We also send the current user ID to the analytics service with each message.