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Comment by teamhappy

9 years ago

I was talking about advertisers running code in your browser. I think you have to opt-in to participate in one of the studies, so that's not happening without your consent.

It looks like Firefox auto-installs the studies though if you've enabled the feature. But it only activates the individual extensions for the studies once you've opted in to participate.

The extensions themselves need to be approved by a bunch of people at mozilla (at least for the normal studies). So I guess nothing bad can happen until you click "participate" or whatever they call it.

Still, I would also consider the notification itself to be an ad. This was obviously a bad idea and I don't want anyone to think I'm defending it. I guess they've chosen to abuse their shield studies for this because it's the only way for them to send notifications to the browser, but that's no excuse. I have the studies disabled anyway but now I'm not even going to consider ever turning them on.

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teamhappy

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roywiggins  9 years ago

I never knowingly opted in to anything and found both the "Studies" section and the "pug-experience" study turned on just now in about:studies. I don't know if it really is meant to be opt-in, but it certainly didn't seem like they've done it correctly.

  • teamhappy  9 years ago

    The wiki page says that no changes are made until you opt in. Can you tell if you're part of the game? (I assume you'd be able to tell somehow)

    • talmand  9 years ago

      I did not recall agreeing to opt-in for the studies and there it is under Privacy & Security as checked.

      I have the pug experience study active and I don't recall the browser asking about it.

      From the studies about page linked from about:studies...

      "When a study is available, you will automatically be enrolled if you meet the criteria. There will be occasions where we might prompt you for participation first."

      Just saw also that if you opt-in for the "Allow Firefox Developer Edition to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" then it automatically checks the studies checkbox for you. I would wonder if I checked the allow sharing at some point in the past, or during installation, with no mention of the studies option. So it was presumed to opt me into the studies automatically.

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