1425663 - Shield studies sometimes get re-enabled

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Shield :: General, defect)

Description

[Laurențiu Nicola]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20171215220126

Steps to reproduce:

I have no reproducer on this, but I disabled Shield studies (from the Settings page) and after a while I've noticed they were back on. I've first noticed this on the 57 nightlies, but it might have been going for much longer. I keep my profiles for a long time and I trusted Firefox to do the right thing.

This has also been reported in other places [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7i4puf/zombie_shield_studies_checkbox_keeps_coming_back/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_looking_glass/dr7vwmd/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_looking_glass/dr750ft/


Actual results:

Sometimes (but very seldom) Shield studies get re-enabled after an update.

I've never seen Shield studies get re-enabled without installing an update.

This might be related to version bumps, but I've had it happen in nightlies of the same version.


Expected results:

Silently opting in users to opt-out "experiments" is detrimental to users' trust. I can't overstate how bad this is.

PS: For anyone else coming here from social media sites, PLEASE refrain for posting "me too" or "WTF Mozilla" comments. The moderators here are heavy-handed at locking down issues and that might be detrimental to fixing this. It will also hurt credence to this issue.

PPS: For anyone worried about this, you can completely (for now, at least) disable shield studies by setting extensions.shield-recipe-client.enabled to false in about:config. Note that this setting might get reset in the future, just like others do (e.g. extensions.ui.experiment.hidden).

Additionally, -- as far as I know, and this might change in the future anyway -- Shield studies are gated by the telemetry setting. Telemetry (as far as I know, again this might change in the future) isn't really harmful to your privacy and actually helps Mozilla, but you should consider turning it off if you dislike their actions. You should also consider turning off Firefox Health Report which -- on mobile, at least -- records sends user interaction data to a third party (Adjust).

Comment 1

[Laurențiu Nicola]

Could this be related to Sync, with some devices that have experiments enabled override the setting in the other ones? I don't know how that works.

Note that I've had this happen on three different profiles, so it's not something related to a specific installation.

Comment 2

[Adolfo Jayme]

This is a big problem, particularly when there is precedent of Mozilla Corp. abusing this mechanism (which, as you might know, is intended to run *studies*) to force-push advertisements.

Comment 3

[R P Herrold]

see also:

> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429162

which asserts that 

> user_pref("extensions.shield-recipe-client.enabled",false);

is a way to do such disablement

note that 'pref' vs. 'user_pref' is the form I used, and which @Mike Cooper [:mythmon]
may not have picked up on as a possible mus-specification on my part

Comment 4

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

I'm not sure exactly which component this belongs in but the shield client is the component that manages studies, not the addons manager.

Comment 5

[Laurențiu Nicola]

I haven't seen this happen in a while, although most of the time since opening the issue I had studies forcefully disabled via user.js.

I'll close it for now; if someone in CC saw this happen lately, I'll gladly reopen it.