1933264 - Copy data policy preferences between profiles in a group

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Updated 6 March 2025 with final scope for MVP release:

For each of the checkboxes in the "Data Collection and Use" section in about:preferences#privacy, including the crash reports checkbox (for now), we want to propagate any changes made in one profile to the rest of the profiles in the profile group. (That is, we'll need to include these prefs in our list of shared prefs.)

We'll also want to include the prefs that are set when users agree to the terms of service, which are the datareporting.policy prefs listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d5cbb5b26c2fe8639da9ea0b0f225018d3697c59/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3734-3743.

To avoid any future gaps in legal compliance, we should also add a warning note to that prefs file (libpref/init/all.js) to remind anyone who adds policy prefs in the future to also add them to the SelectableProfileService list of shared prefs.

We're also going to add a sentence to the privacy section of about:preferences to explain that changes to these settings are applied to other profiles. See screenshot for specifics (taken from the Figma on 6 March). We'll need this extra sentence to be hidden unless the profiles feature is enabled.

To implement passing preferences around between profiles in a group, it should be enough to add the full list of data collection prefs to the initialSharedPrefs list in the SelectableProfileService, https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/profiles/SelectableProfileService.sys.mjs#109.

Note that the crash reports checkbox is disabled by default. The more privacy-centric approach would be to keep it per-profile, but we've heard from UX that the simpler approach (copy around all the data collection prefs) is easier for users to understand and the better approach at least until we make more involved settings changes prior to the profiles 100% release later this year.

Comment 1

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Mass setting S2 severity for 0.5% release bugs. Apologies for the bug spam!

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

If we're syncing data choices across profiles we need to also sync the "new" profileGroupId when opting in.

Comment 3

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Clearing assignment--this is not yet ready to work; we are waiting on product to confirm the final behavior with legal and other PMs affected by propagating the unenrollment prefs across profiles in a group.

We have confirmed with legal that our fix does not need to ship with the other ToS changes in 136, because we are starting our rollout soon thereafter in 138.

Comment 4

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Copying over a comment from emilyw on slack:

Copy is approved and now in Figma here

Request to update SUMO for 138 is here: bug 1952062

Comment 5

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Attachment: screenshot of new about:preferences copy

Comment 6

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Attachment: Bug 1933264 - Copy data preferences between profiles in a group. r?#profiles-reviewers

Also add an explanatory note to preferences.

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/9c145342b899
Copy data preferences between profiles in a group. r=profiles-reviewers,fluent-reviewers,settings-reviewers,mossop,bolsson

Comment 8

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9c145342b899

Comment 9

[Raluca Popovici, Desktop QA]

Verified as fixed on Windows 11 and macOS 13.2.1 using Fx 138.0b2.