1922019 - browser.shopping.experience2023.active "true" (firefox130 and firefox133)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox Graveyard :: Shopping, defect)

Description

[Erwan]

Attachment: Screenshot 2024-10-01 at 18-00-14 Préférences avancées.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:130.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/130.0

Steps to reproduce:

I just looked in my configurations (basically for something else) and I came across this.

Actual results:

Features : “Shopping”, "experience", “ads” are enabled by default

Expected results:

All these features should be disabled until the user accepts them. This is not my case.

Comment 1

[Greg Stoll :gstoll]

The Data Loss Prevention component is specifically for "bugs in Firefox's support of DLP (Data Loss Prevention) products and the Content Analysis SDK including DLP-related prompts, warnings, and performance." The pref this bug is about is related to Shopping.

Comment 2

[Erwan]

(In reply to Greg Stoll :gstoll from comment #1)

The Data Loss Prevention component is specifically for "bugs in Firefox's support of DLP (Data Loss Prevention) products and the Content Analysis SDK including DLP-related prompts, warnings, and performance." The pref this bug is about is related to Shopping.

Okay, sorry.
It's just that the subject isn't shopping. The point is that this feature is enabled by default and users aren't aware of it.
Otherwise, I don't care about shopping.
So I'd prefer the topic to be about the lack of control and possible data leakage via “shopping” experience analysis.

Comment 3

[Erwan]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: This concerns at least these versions.

Comment 4

[Donal Meehan [:dmeehan]]

Rejecting release tracking request, this will be triaged by the relevant team
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Tracking_rules

Comment 5

[Monica Chiorean (OOO August 21st 5:30PM)]

Marking as new as the issue is reproducing on Win11x64 using Firefox build 133.0a1(20241016214437), but the "Review Checker" is not displayed until pref "browser.shopping.experience2023.enabled" is set to true (which by default is set to false).

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

There are upwards of 4000 internal preferences in Firefox. "preferences" is kind of a misnomer because many values do not encode user choice, but internal flags, counters, and other information used by the Firefox code to make decisions.

Many of these "preferences" have interdependencies (that is, the value for preference A is ignored until/unless the value of preference B is set to some specific value). This is one of those cases - the preferences in question relate to the Review Checker feature. Firefox's preference infrastructure only supports a single unconditional default value for preferences, and does not support making the relation between preferences explicit, so we cannot straightforwardly indicate this interdependency in about:config. The relationship is implicit and encoded only in the code that consults those preferences (which is available for you to read should you want to, e.g. in https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/ ). This is one of several reasons why when you first open about:config we tell you to "proceed with caution". It is not always straightforward to understand how prefs work or what the effect of changing one or more of them would be.

The preferences in the screenshot that contain the word ads have no effect (whatever they're set to) unless both (a) the Review Checker feature is rolled out to users (controlled via the browser.shopping.experience2023.enabled pref mentioned earlier) and (b) you / a given user chooses to opt in to ("accept") the feature. No data is sent without both those conditions being true and thus nothing is "leaked". (In the event that a user chooses to opt in, they then have further options to control that experience in more detail, some of which is stored in some of the prefs in your screenshot, e.g. how automatically that particular feature opens.)

Right now, that feature is not available everywhere by default. Based on your screenshot, it is not available to you at the moment, nor have you opted in (most likely because we never showed you any UI that allowed you to opt in because the feature is not available, nor have you changed the relevant about:config preferences).

So the preferences are having no effect, and won't until, as you phrase it "the user [you] accept them".

Hopefully this helps address your concerns. As there is no technical fix for the confusion around the values that these prefs have, I am going to close this report.