847856 - Don't send logcat data with each crash report

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Bug 815684 added the last 200 lines of logcat data to crash reports on Jelly Bean and higher devices. While this is useful in diagnosing some crashes, there is also a lot of logcat data that we never look at (i.e. crashes for which we don't need to see the logcat, or low-volume crashes that we never even look at).

Ordinarily this wouldn't matter but the logcat data often contains personally identifiable and sensitive data, and so I feel like we shouldn't be collecting so much of it if we're not going to be using it. I would like to reduce the number of crashes that send logcat data - either restrict by random percentage (e.g. send logcat with 10% of crashes), or restrict it so that the logcat is only sent if the user checks the "send URLs" checkbox. I prefer the latter just because the logcat often contains javascript errors including URLs and/or even more personally identifiable data (like email addresses) and so sending this only when the user has explicitly allowed it seems like a good idea.

Comment 1

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Note also that for high-volume crashes (which are the ones we actually look at logcat for) the odds are pretty good that we'll find at least one crash report with logcat data. It may be that for low-volume crashes we don't have such crash reports, but right now we don't look at them anyway. The net effect on how this information helps us should be pretty low.

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Attachment: Only send logcat when user allows URLs

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 721166 [details] [diff] [review]
Only send logcat when user allows URLs

Sounds like a good idea

Comment 4

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/38b9c30772a8

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Also CC'ing :kairo as an FYI (probably should have done that when I created the bug, oops)

Comment 6

[Robert Kaiser]

The minidump also can contain just as much personally identifiable information as the logcat, though not in such plainly readable text. I wonder if the restriction here is really necessary.

Comment 7

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/38b9c30772a8