Combining Telemetry and FHR

[Benjamin Smedberg]

In order to implement A/B and other experimental testing of Firefox 
features, we intend to begin incremental changes to combine the 
Telemetry and FHR data collection systems.


As a first step, we are looking to add certain specific data items 
related to planned A/B tests and experiments to be recorded in the FHR 
data collection system. These items, such as translation rates for the 
planned in-browser translation project, will still fall under the "Usage 
Statistics" section of the Firefox privacy policy and will only be 
collected from users who have telemetry enabled. The primary purpose of 
this change is to allow us to answer questions about how users behave 
across multiple sessions, which is currently not possible with 
Telemetry. As in the past, none of the data collected will be personal 
or identify particular users.


We plan to make any necessary changes to the Firefox in-product notices, 
privacy policy and supporting wiki pages to allow this kind of mixed 
data collection.  Because this is new, we will be carefully reviewing 
the measurements for privacy concerns around fingerprinting or private data.


In the future, we hope to more fully integrate the data collection 
systems so that telemetry and FHR use the same server backend and 
reporting systems. On the client, my goal is to separate the policy 
decisions about whether a measurement  is enabled or disabled by default 
  from the implementation details of whether it is declared as a 
telemetry histogram or healthreport reporter. On the server, I want to 
share dashboards, query systems, and and techniques, no matter whether 
the measurement is an opt-out FHR probe or an opt-in telemetry probe. I 
have written up some details about this long-term goal here, for those 
who are interested, but this plan isn't complete yet: 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JKnqejahVWMev4xUYGbRiICw0HpwopcXBqPYxco0YzU/edit?usp=sharing


Please direct any questions or concerns to the mozilla.dev.privacy list.


--BDS

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