1178220 - Disabling FHR/Telemetry when unified not honored

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, defect)

Description

[Franck (Wip)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Firefox Developer Edition 40.0a2 - Build ID: 20150628004006

Disabling FHR and Telemetry in Firefox's settings does not stop data collection.

Steps to reproduce:
  - create a new profile and start Firefox
  - open about:preferences#advanced > Data Choices
  - uncheck "Share additional data (i.e., Telemetry)"
  - uncheck "Enable Firefox Developer Edition Health Report"

Expected results:
FHR/Telemetry data should not be collected.

Actual results:
Data are collected and stored in "datareporting" and "saved-telemetry-pings" folders.

It seems to be a regression introduced by the unified telemetry.
Disabling "toolkit.telemetry.unified" reverts to the current/expected behavior.

Comment 1

[Franck (Wip)]

The behavior described previously is now in beta.
I'm concerned about my privacy choices: are they honored ?

Comment 2

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Alessio, this issue has been fixed .Can you please verify and close the bug? Thanks

First good revision: 8a4cf6cc9e8060bdc1c63d800e54d9013e372ed9
Last bad revision: 1f4185f18537eac0ea187a3a798315b102edbf7f
Pushlog: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/pushloghtml?fromchange=1f4185f18537eac0ea187a3a798315b102edbf7f&tochange=8a4cf6cc9e8060bdc1c63d800e54d9013e372ed9

Looks like the following bug has the changes which introduced the fix:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1182424

Comment 3

[Franck (Wip)]

The issue seems partially fixed.

Telemetry data are non longer stored in the "saved-telemetry-pings" folders when disabled.
(may be thanks to bug 1182424)

However, FHR data are still collected whether it is disabled in the options or not.
Files keep appearing in folder "datareporting" and in "archived" subfolders.

Example files :
  - <profile>datareporting\session-state.json
  - <profile>datareporting\state.json
  - <profile>datareporting\archived\2016-03\1457725286683.26481f9b-e425-484a-989e-0b6d24d270cd.main.jsonlz4
  - <profile>datareporting\archived\2016-03\1457725286828.d870f204-b4be-4a78-873c-2b17a8a5ab70.saved-session.jsonlz4

In about:config, preferences "datareporting.sessions.current.*" keeps moving,
especially "datareporting.sessions.current.activeTicks" which counts active ticks
although I unchecked "Enable Nightly Health Report" in the options.

Tested 2016/03/166 with Firefox 45.0 release and Nightly 48.0a1-20160316030233 with new both profiles.

Comment 4

[Alessio Placitelli [:Dexter]]

(In reply to Franck (Wip) from comment #3)
> The issue seems partially fixed.
> 
> Telemetry data are non longer stored in the "saved-telemetry-pings" folders
> when disabled.
> (may be thanks to bug 1182424)
> 
> However, FHR data are still collected whether it is disabled in the options
> or not.

That's the intended behaviour, by design.

Disabling FHR in Firefox's settings stops sending the collected data to Mozilla servers, but the base set of telemetry measurements is still archived on the disk to power some other components of the browser (e.g. Self support).