How enabling notifications helps to protect your events
On this page:
How Glean stores events before uploading to the cloud
How your browser’s persistent storage works
Why we need to request you enable notifications
Enabling notifications (and persistent storage) in Glean
How Glean stores events before uploading to the cloud
When you use Glean we store your events locally in your browser’s “local storage” before we upload that data to the cloud for safe keeping.
This local storage is a pool of disk space that your browser sets aside for websites to store data in, but the browser doesn’t guarantee that any particular website’s data will be protected if another website requests more storage space.
In the event of a website asking for storage space that the browser does not have available it will delete data stored in local storage for other websites that it deems to be less used.
This means that the data that Glean stores in your browser’s local storage could be deleted if another website requests a lot of storage space.
How your browser’s persistent storage works
There is a solution to the problem of your browser looking to delete the data saved in local storage by Glean to make space available for other websites.
This is called “persistent storage” and it tells the browser to keep that data safe when freeing up space in local storage.
In order to enable persistent storage, Glean has to request permission from your browser, but Chrome instead of giving the user control to grant or deny permission, automates the decision to grant the permission in the background based on how important it believes the website is to the user.
Sometimes Chrome might decide not to grant Glean permission to use persistent storage.
Why we need to request you enable notifications
Luckily there is a work around for Chrome’s automated decision approach - enabling notifications will also mean that Chrome will give Glean the permissions to use persistent storage.
In order to guarantee that Glean can use persistent storage correctly we need to request that you grant us permission for notifications. We won’t send you notifications once this is enabled but we need to do so in order to keep your data safe before we can upload it to the cloud.
Enabling notifications (and persistent storage) in Glean
- Under the account menu you’ll find an option called "Protect Your Events"
If you don’t see this option then you may have notifications already granted, you can verify this by clicking the site settings button at the left of the URL in your browser.
- Press the "Enable notifications" button to trigger Glean to request the notifications permission.
- Your browser will then ask you if you want to allow or deny permission for Glean to use the notifications permission.
- Click "allow" and Glean will be able to use persistent storage, keeping your events safe
Resetting Notifications
If you've blocked permission, then you will need to reset the notifications. You can do this by:
- Pressing the site settings button to the left of the URL in your browser
- Pressing “reset permission” under the Notifications heading in the popup that shows
- Reloading the page in your browser (it will prompt you to do this also)
- Follow the steps above to allow permissions
