Why we’d like to know where you are

How we’re using our website data to help more people

If you’ve been on our website over the past few weeks, you might have come across a little message that looks something like this:

So what’s that all about? Why would we need to know where someone is before we can help with their problem? Well, technically we don’t need to, but there are some pretty good reasons we’re asking. More importantly, we’re making sure we collect the data in a secure and responsible way.

Why do we want to know your location?

There are 2 main reasons for this: we want to make sure people are looking at the right advice for them the data will be vital for our service, helping us to help more people

First up: we think some of our users might be looking at the wrong advice.

The laws in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can be very different — depending on the topic. This means we often need to provide different advice to people in different countries. In theory, people should be able to find their way to the right content for their country. But if they don’t, it could mean they’re reading advice that’s completely wrong for them. That’s not good. We currently don’t know how often people read the wrong advice for where they are. If we don’t know this, then we also don’t know how big a problem it really is. With location data, we’ll be able to compare the parts of the UK users are in with the advice they’re looking at.

Reason number 2: good old data.

A lot of people know we give advice but we also do a huge amount of policy and advocacy work — spotting trends and convincing the government to step in when needed. We already have access to hugely valuable data through our new case management system. Using Casebook, we can see what problems people are coming to us with in different areas. The data from our 1-to-1 advice is great, but the number of people coming to our website is about 12 times bigger. If we could see which areas users were accessing our website from, we’d have even greater insight into local issues, improving our local policy and advocacy for communities. We’d also then be able to use this data to help design and deliver new local services.

How we’re being responsible with data

Even though we have good reasons for collecting location data, that doesn’t mean we’re giving ourselves free rein to do whatever we like. We need to make sure people’s privacy and data is protected. So how are we doing this?

1. When we collect users’ locations, we’ll only record latitude and longitude to 2 decimal places. This gives an accuracy of around a square kilometre. To give you an idea of what that means, the average UK population density is 272 people per square kilometre. Even in the remotest parts of the Highlands and Islands it’s still around 10 people per square kilometre — so no one will be identifiable from their location data.
2. We’ll never collect data on more sensitive topics There are also some more sensitive advice topics where even with all our safeguards in place, asking for a person’s location could endanger them or be a barrier to them getting the advice they need. We’ll never collect location data on these pages: immigration gender violence bailiffs children and young people coming from abroad and claiming benefits ending a relationship. We’re also making sure these users can’t be identified even if they accept location collection on a ‘safe’ page and then navigate to a sensitive page during the same visit to the site.

What’s next?

We want to make sure we’re not changing how people use our website, or stopping them from accessing advice. So to start with we’re rolling this out to only 1% of people who visit our online advice. The next stage is to work out how many people are accessing the country-specific advice that’s right for them. If it turns out that a lot of people are accessing the wrong advice, we’ll need to look at how we direct users to the right information. Once we’ve done that we’ll be able to start using the data to improve our service in other ways. For example using someone’s location to find their nearest local Citizens Advice, and using the data for our service design and development.

Some data sciencey stuff

To collect the location data we’re using the geolocation API built into HTML5. To deploy the code onto our site we’re using Google Tag Manager. This has let us make quick changes to the code if we need to. It also makes it easy to define firing triggers, so we can exclude specific pages and only fire occasionally (1% of the time). In future we’re thinking about better ways to ask for users’ permission, instead of using the rather blunt default browser message when a page loads. We’d like to be able to tell users why we want their location data at the same time we ask for it.