Bugzilla

In light of the ToS work, we are rethinking whether certain privacy-related preferences should be applied to new profiles in a group, or even whether changing such preferences should be propagated to all other profiles in a group. This is a placeholder bug for now.

Updated 6 March 2025 with final scope for MVP release:

For each of the checkboxes in the "Data Collection and Use" section in about:preferences#privacy, except for the crash reports checkbox, we want to propagate any changes made in one profile to the rest of the profiles in the profile group. (That is, we'll need to include these prefs in our list of shared prefs.)

We'll also want to include the prefs that are set when users agree to the terms of service, which are the `datareporting.policy` prefs listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d5cbb5b26c2fe8639da9ea0b0f225018d3697c59/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3734-3743.

To avoid any future gaps in legal compliance, we should also add a warning note to that prefs file (libpref/init/all.js) to remind anyone who adds policy prefs in the future to also add them to the SelectableProfileService list of shared prefs.

We're also going to add a sentence to the privacy section of about:preferences to explain that changes to these settings are applied to other profiles. See screenshot for specifics (taken from the [Figma](https://www.figma.com/design/FXL6eQGaZ3MI50XebsCIJ8/Profiles?node-id=14957-19821&m=dev) on 6 March). We'll need this extra sentence to be hidden unless the profiles feature is enabled.

To implement passing preferences around between profiles in a group, it should be enough to add the full list of data collection prefs to the `initialSharedPrefs` list in the SelectableProfileService, https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/profiles/SelectableProfileService.sys.mjs#109.

Updated 6 March 2025 with final scope for MVP release:

For each of the checkboxes in the "Data Collection and Use" section in about:preferences#privacy, including the crash reports checkbox (for now), we want to propagate any changes made in one profile to the rest of the profiles in the profile group. (That is, we'll need to include these prefs in our list of shared prefs.)

We'll also want to include the prefs that are set when users agree to the terms of service, which are the `datareporting.policy` prefs listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d5cbb5b26c2fe8639da9ea0b0f225018d3697c59/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3734-3743.

To avoid any future gaps in legal compliance, we should also add a warning note to that prefs file (libpref/init/all.js) to remind anyone who adds policy prefs in the future to also add them to the SelectableProfileService list of shared prefs.

We're also going to add a sentence to the privacy section of about:preferences to explain that changes to these settings are applied to other profiles. See screenshot for specifics (taken from the [Figma](https://www.figma.com/design/FXL6eQGaZ3MI50XebsCIJ8/Profiles?node-id=14957-19821&m=dev) on 6 March). We'll need this extra sentence to be hidden unless the profiles feature is enabled.

To implement passing preferences around between profiles in a group, it should be enough to add the full list of data collection prefs to the `initialSharedPrefs` list in the SelectableProfileService, https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/profiles/SelectableProfileService.sys.mjs#109.

Note that the crash reports checkbox is disabled by default. The more privacy-centric approach would be to keep it per-profile, but we've heard from UX that the simpler approach (copy around all the data collection prefs) is easier for users to understand and the better approach at least until we make more involved settings changes prior to the profiles 100% release later this year.