Open Bug 1034035 Opened 10 years ago Updated 2 years ago

[Session Restore] Talos profiling for Session Restore

Categories

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Session Restore
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: Yoric, Unassigned)

Details

We need to activate Talos profiling.
Has Talos profiling been vetted for privacy issues?
Talos is a benchmark suite. No user data is involved. Profiling is just a way to get more details on what took place during the execution of the benchmarks.
For more details about Talos, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos
I've read through some of the source code on github and there are specific privacy related comments in the code.  There are also non-https uploads which, considered with the code comments, through up some red flags for me.  Any kind of data gathering should be reviewed by the privacy team before it's made active.
I'm almost sure we are talking about different things. Talos is not executed on user's machines, and doesn't touch user's profiles or data.
JMJimmy, are you thinking of Telemetry? Telemetry and Firefox Health Report are the only bits of data mining that Firefox does under normal circumstances (with the latter being more invasive but opt-in). If you have privacy concerns about either of them you should file bugs on the relevant components (Toolkit:Telemetry and Firefox Health Report:*).
No, I'm definitely not thinking of Telemetry or FHR (I have bugs submitted/issues with regards to privacy with both of those as well).  It was due to those issues that, when I saw mention of Talos for the first time (yesterday), I immediately became concerned.  The first bit of code I read on Github was incorrect though - it's the gecko profiler.

I went through the code here: https://hg.mozilla.org/build/talos/file/ and from my first impressions it seems like output.py is creating a hardware fingerprint, connecting it to results with page URLs and the machine name as a weak UUID.  The machine name in and of itself isn't necessarily unique, however, the likelihood of the hardware + machine name combination creating an identifiable fingerprint is fairly high, especially for home users.  This will be especially true of Windows 8 machines due to the Microsoft account name becoming the machine name by default.

This is the only item that has jumped out so far as I've skimmed through.  I need to trace the use of httplib.HTTP but it's likely harmless since the comments for the eventual implementation of submission indicate it will be HTTPS.
Whatever Talos does, it only happens on a copy of Firefox we run ourselves on our testfarm, with a profile created specifically for testing purposes. No user is involved, nor any user data, so really, no privacy.
Severity: normal → S3
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