Comment by yborg
9 years ago
Apparently it's getting loaded anyway for some people that say they had "Studies" disabled and/or "Studies" itself became re-enabled.
The whole idea of slipping paid advertorial content into what are billed as "research" kind of gives the lie to this whole thing and is why I never turn these on in any product. Which is also why it's now "opt-out" by default, and why it will eventually not be an option at all. It's all for our own good, you see.
You don't just need "Studies" enabled, you also need to explicitly opt-in to each specific study on an individual basis:
> Participation in an individual study is opt-in
Source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies
If that didn't happen in this case, then I suspect it's probably a bug.
I can confirm this most certainly did not happen in my case and, from other comments, there seem to be a number of us who did not opt in to this "study."
Same here. I didn't even known about Studies until reading this thread.
> you also need to explicitly opt-in
Wrong, as far as I see: Looking in my about:config, I see
enabled by default. The settings that I've changed from the default are shown in bold. These aren't bold. Those are the defaults. Everybody can check.
That means that the user must actively take steps to disable them, if he knows that they exist and where he can disable them.
Every time the user creates a new profile, and most probably also when he "refreshes" an old one, he has by default the studies allowed.
It's even worse in other aspects: through the UI the "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" can be unchecked but it doesn't change the value of "experiments.enabled" to false in about:config.
Apparently the "experiments" allow Mozilla to install the "experimental" extensions to any user, without him knowing. And these extensions are invisible in the GUI! Even if the user goes to the about:config and sets extensions.ui.experiment.hidden to false, it will be automatically set to true again.
I speak from experience that a lot of FF users don't even know what about:config is or how to edit it.
It all seems sneaky and deliberately obtuse.
Are you sure that's what those config options do? I tried looking them up, but they don't seem to be listed in Mozilla's config documentation: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
According to the Wiki page I linked in my previous comment, global settings shouldn't even matter in this case; since each SHIELD study must be opted into on an individual basis. (Or at least, that's how it's _supposed_ to work.)
Edit: Looks like the wiki was updated to state that some studies can be opt-out rather than opt-in. This also seems in-line with the documentation for SHIELD, which has a section on opt-out studies: https://normandy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/actions/opt-o...
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It looks like experiments are previews of potential new features, like letting you pop a video out of a page https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid?utm_source...
Whereas studies collect usage data.
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Well, this is very troubling; it's installed in my browser. Not only did I not get prompted, I never volunteered for being in any studies. I'm running Firefox on Linux, but I installed it from Mozilla, and not the package manager.
I just installed FF on my mom's new desktop yesterday, noticed this crap while installing ublock origin. Definitely didn't opt in to anything. Made me wonder whether I'd accidentally downloaded some malware from a look-alike site, instead of official Firefox.
Firefox Studies aren't new, and aren't opt-out by default. They're opt-in per study, in fact. The code to run them comes with Firefox, that's it. All this HN link is is someone asking what the add-on is, not proclaiming it did anything.
about:studies->Preferences shows "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" is enabled on my copy of Firefox 57.0.2(OSX). I don't remember opting in at install time, was it hidden behind some innocuous-sounding checkbox?
In my Firefox 52.5.1 under a current CentOS 7, there is no about:studies. Either "studies" has been newly removed (Firefox updated yesterday, I think?) or about:studies is new or Firefox Studies has been included by default after the 52 series. Perhaps its just me, but I still think of post-52 Firefox as "new".
It's nonetheless not obvious to me why you were downvoted; I don't know if someone else was annoyed at your definition of "new" or whether there were other dubious claims in your comment. Perhaps privacy advocates are just too exhausted and cranky to explain themselves again.
Just as another data point, I'm on 56.0, and while the option is there, it is default not enabled. So, it looks like something changed in the move to Quantum.