1850243 - We need easy settings to totally disable telemetry

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Mimine]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0

Steps to reproduce:

I searched for the settings to disable telemetry.

Actual results:

No settings were found to totally disable telemetry.
We should be able to disable "toolkit.telemetry" "datareporting" etc. etc. from the settings.

Expected results:

We need easy settings to totally disable telemetry

Comment 1

[Monica Chiorean]

I marked issue as New so that development team can add their input to this request. Also if the component is not correct please update.
Thank you for your report.

Comment 2

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Oh, it's probably because you searched for "telemetry" instead of "data". We have a single checkbox that opts you out of data collection systems including telemetry. You'll find it under Preferences/Settings > Privacy & Security > Firefox Data Collection and Use, and you can get localized information about how to find this via this support.mozilla.org article. If you want to opt out of sending data to Mozilla, simply uncheck the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" box.

This will mean that we won't have your Firefox's data to help us make informed decisions about feature usage and bugs, though. We do only collect what we need to in order to make Firefox the best we can (you can browse some of it via the public data sources on https://telemetry.mozilla.org/ if you're interested), so I encourage you to consider leaving it turned on.

But it's up to you. We'd never take that choice away from our users.

I'm going to mark this bug as RESOLVED > FIXED as I think this addresses your issue. If it doesn't, just reply back and I'll reopen it and we can see what else needs to be done.

Comment 3

[Mimine]

I unchecked all options in settings > privacy > Firefox Data Collection

But telemetry is still enabled.

In about:config, we still have these :
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry = true
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry = true
browser.ping-centre.telemetry = true
toolkit.telemetry.bhrPing.enabled = true
toolkit.telemetry.firstShutdownPing.enabled = true
toolkit.telemetry.newProfilePing.enabled = true
toolkit.telemetry.server = https://incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org
toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled = true
toolkit.telemetry.unified = true
toolkit.telemetry.updatePing.enabled = true

Is it normal ?

Comment 4

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Ah, good ol' about:config. It includes anything that needs to be persisted between application runs and isn't a list of what you might consider "options" or "settings". They can, and do, mean all sorts of things, but in this case they're all subordinate to the big "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" one and you need not worry.

In short: yes, this is normal.

Since you've gone to this effort to find and list them, would you like to know what they do?

• browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry = true - I can't find any code presently in Firefox or changed in the past year that used this preference. It might be leftover from some old version, or it might be autogenerated and never used by some layer of abstraction of the Activity Stream system, which makes it subordinate to the next one on the list:
• browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry = true - Whether data collection for specifically the Activity Stream system (which helps with newtab) is turned on (subordinate to the checkbox)
• browser.ping-centre.telemetry = true - Whether the PingCentre mechanism (which we're in the process of removing) for sending data is turned on (subordinate to the checkbox)
• toolkit.telemetry.bhrPing.enabled = true Whether the Background Hang Monitor can upload its information (subordinate to the checkbox). This we wanted to be able to control based on channel, so a pref seemed appropriate. It can be a big ping, too, since it contains stack traces of slow code, so we wanted to be able to turn it off if we had to.
• toolkit.telemetry.firstShutdownPing.enabled = true Whether the "first-shutdown" ping can upload (subordinate to the checkbox). We weren't sure if we were going to want to keep sending this, so we left it in just in case. That was about seven years ago.
• toolkit.telemetry.newProfilePing.enabled = true Whether the "new-profile" ping can upload (subordinate to the checkbox). We weren't sure if this would be too much for our system to handle, so we left this ability to turn it off specifically. That was ages ago.
• toolkit.telemetry.server = https://incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org if data upload was turned on (which it isn't, since you unchecked the box), this is the server to which we'd post information. We had this idea that specific Linux distributions might want to collect the telemetry from their own compiled Firefoxes, or maybe someone forking the code would want an easy way to change this... no one ever did anything with it, so only our old system respects this.
• toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled = true Whether we should use the small pingsender executable to send data when it's too late in Firefox shutdown for the network to remain available. With the checkbox unchecked, there's nothing to send, so this doesn't change anything. (subordinate to the checkbox)
• toolkit.telemetry.unified = true Oh, how I wish I could remove this. This was introduced eight or more years ago to signify whether "telemetry" meant the old telemetry or the "new" telemetry that was also carrying Firefox Health Report information. This is always true for Firefox Desktop and was always false for the old version of Firefox for Android.
• toolkit.telemetry.updatePing.enabled = true Whether the "update" ping can upload (subordinate to the checkbox). We weren't sure if this would be too much for our system to handle, so we left this ability to turn it off specifically. That was ages ago.

In general, you can find documentation on the old Telemetry system's preferences here and the new system's prefs here. The datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled one is the big one that turns it all off, and it's hooked up to the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" checkbox. We care about user control so we make it really easy to turn data collection off: we wouldn't make you have to dig through about:config for something that important to our users.

Does that help answer your question?

Comment 5

[Mimine]

OK, I understand : if the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" checkbox is turned off, then those "about:config" parameters are not active.

But what got me doubting was that I found many "guides" who told me to disable those parameters to have telemetry disabled.
So these guides are wrong and misleading !
Examples of a misleading guides :
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197144
https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection

What should we do ?

Comment 6

[Chris H-C :chutten]

I think the correct thing to do about those two in specific is nothing. For the support Q&A, that question is six years old and wasn't answered by someone from Mozilla. I don't doubt we have the right to remove it if we want to, but it's not harmful and it reflects thoughts and feelings of the time. As for the github repo, filing issues or PRs against it might only draw attention. If I, a Mozilla employee, were to take action it might only encourage more people to look at it.

One thing we could consider is to figure out how to show the data collection checkbox when/if someone searches for telemetry in Firefox Desktop's preferences UI. That might help people in a way that they no longer feel they need to search around for guides. Doing some quick research suggests we know how to do this in a translatable way (bug 970675, bug 1631944, and possibly others).

Would you like to make this a contribution to Firefox Desktop? I don't know if you have an interest in contributing a fix like this, but I can help walk you through the process if you'd like. It shouldn't prove too technical: after getting your environment working you should only have to make two changes: adding .searchkeywords = telemetry around this line in the file that contains the text for that page, and then adding data-l10n-attrs="searchkeywords" near this line of the file that defines the checkbox. A quick mach build and you'd be able to check that it works on your own machine before putting it up for review, and then it would ship worldwide in Firefox 119.

If not, that's okay. I can take it from here and make that the change that resolves this bug. What do you think?

Comment 7

[Mimine]

Nice solution.
I will let you do it, it will be much faster than me.
Thanks for the help.

Comment 8

[Chris H-C :chutten]

It taking longer is worth it if you wanted to contribute to the project. But that's all right, I'll take it from here.

Comment 9

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Attachment: Bug 1850243 - Add 'telemetry' keyword to data upload pref UI to aid discoverability r?Gijs!

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/9d93aa35ae7f
Add 'telemetry' keyword to data upload pref UI to aid discoverability r=Gijs,fluent-reviewers,settings-reviewers

Comment 11

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9d93aa35ae7f