823638 - test pilot study on cookies and social widgets

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Labs Graveyard :: Test Pilot Studies, defect)

Description

[[:mmc] Monica Chew (no longer reading bugmail)]

I'd like to propose test pilot study on cookies and social widgets for next quarter. The background for this is that cookies are used for tracking (esp. 3rd party), Firefox has a plethora of cookie management permissions that are undiscoverable and unusable, and we keep getting requests to make things "better" but don't have a great idea on what that would entail. I would hate for us to end up with a superset of all other browsers' cookie permission management schemes and still not be able to help a majority of users.

Thus, we need more information on cookie statistics! Here's a short list of metrics that would be useful:
- Distribution of cookie setting and getting, e.g. how many first and third party cookies/time do active users incur
- How many cookies are sent in response to user interaction
- Top sites that set cookies by volume, both first and third party
- Top pairs of sites that set third party cookies
- Distribution of cookie types (tracking, login)
- Frequency of user interaction with social widgets
- Frequency of social widget injection onto pages

Some of these are reaches, for example, I am not aware of any ungameable heuristics for measuring user interaction in JS, and any information on sites would definitely require a privacy review.

Comment 1

[[:mmc] Monica Chew (no longer reading bugmail)]

Update: ddahl and I are working on this, as TP team is become more self-serve.

Comment 2

[[:mmc] Monica Chew (no longer reading bugmail)]

Repo is at http://github.com/mozilla/cookiemonster

Comment 3

[[:mmc] Monica Chew (no longer reading bugmail)]

http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com/2013/10/cookie-counting.html