903518 - Health report shouldn't collect data when its turned off

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Health Report Graveyard :: Client: Android, defect)

Description

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Health report keeps collecting data even when its turned off. Turning it on will submit all the data to Mozilla that was collected when you had it turned off.

That's contrary to most user expectations of the feature and the pref. Its also a waste of resources and memory on the phone for the user. We shouldn't store any of this data if the user has opted out.

Comment 1

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

This question came up for desktop (I can't recall where). The result should be the same for Android: WONTFIX.

Even if data upload is disabled, users can derive benefit from FHR data by going to about:healthreport. This is a core feature of FHR: users don't need to submit data to derive a benefit.

If users don't want to submit data, they shouldn't enable data upload.

If you have additional concerns, I suggest you take it to the [e-mail] mailing list, where more eyeballs and decision makers will see them.

If I am misunderstanding your request, I apologize.

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

This is about (at least) how the UI doesn't make that clear then. There's a line with "Nightly Health Report" and a checkbox. I assumed that unchecking it disabled "Nightly Health Report". If that's not what it does, we should make that clear to people.

I don't want this to be something like sync again, where users think of it as one thing when its really something different.

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

To be fair, that checkbox is in the "Data choices" settings (controlling which data gets sent to Mozilla) and the description starts "Shares data with...". I understand that that could be misleading if you assume that sharing data is the only purpose for collecting it.

I don't think there are any intentions to have health report itself be switchable; an argument that it affects perf implies that we're OK harming the experience of users who don't turn it off, which I don't think is the case. Furthermore, FHR is (and will increasingly be) an important part of Firefox's self-healing.

You might have a point worth discussing about whether this matches user intents -- take it to fhr-dev?

We have work underway to ensure that Android FHR only keeps an appropriate amount of data (i.e., as little as possible to deliver the expected user benefit). If you're seeing instances where this data recording is impacting the user experience, please file a bug! Otherwise, take a look at Bug 870171 and friends.

Thanks!