Saved telemetry pings, why?

[Drumbrake]

I've disabled everything that I could trace back to telemetry (which is apparently confirmed on the about:telemetry page), and yet in Firefox beta 40 I see this saved telemetry pings folder that keeps coming back after I delete it, what am I missing here?
I don't want to see any "telemetry pings" whatsoever, just to be clear.

[JayhawksRock]

I have nothing saved. toolkit.telemetry.enabled is false and Telemetry Log is grayed out. Have you not disabled the 2 options in about:telemetry

[Virtual_ManPL]

Try disabling everything with 'telemetry' in name in about:config
But to be sure, is it just blank folder "saved-telemetry-pings" or it have some content in it?

[KarmaQ]

From what I can see, the folder/files are regenerated each time fx starts, however, if you have, like me, all the telemetry stuff disabled in about:config, nothing is being sent anywhere. It may be there's a pref with a name unrelated to telemetry that's responsible for the folder/file generation or it may be hard coded...

By the way, if you haven't looked at the data in the files, it's quite 'interesting' to see what's being collected.

[Omega X]

http://telemetry.mozilla.org/

[JayhawksRock]

By the way, if you haven't looked at the data in the files, it's quite 'interesting' to see what's being collected.

Where is my name, address, phone number, IP Address, location and what I had for breakfast this morning.... I'm disapointed in the crappy job of violating my privacy

[KarmaQ]

By the way, if you haven't looked at the data in the files, it's quite 'interesting' to see what's being collected.

Where is my name, address, phone number, IP Address, location and what I had for breakfast this morning.... I'm disapointed in the crappy job of violating my privacy

it's a shame indeed. If they included that information we'd really have something to complain about

[therube]

The most telling thing I see in there is that it knows your extensions (if you consider that "telling").

Helps to make it a bit readable:

: %s/,/\r/g
: !}sort

[Drumbrake]

Well, aside of a list of phone numbers, recent movies, and assorted vacation pics, the lack of which was frankly very annoying , there is indeed quite a lot of unique information in that file inside the saved-telemetry-pings directory, stuff like extensions, modified preferences and crash info, which is indeed material for browser fingerprinting.

Which obviously brings the question, if I have disabled everything I could and that info is never going to be sent anyways, then why is it being collected in the first place? Just for the heck of writing more stuff inside my profile?

It's the first time that I see this, so far disabling telemetry has been enough to avoid any (visible) telemetry-related data to be stored inside my profile.

____________________________________________________________________

Try disabling everything with 'telemetry' in name in about:config

I have nothing saved. toolkit.telemetry.enabled is false and Telemetry Log is grayed out. Have you not disabled the 2 options in about:telemetry

That has, of course, been done. As a matter of fact, I've been doing it for a long time now, and even fixed those preferences in a user.js file.

[KarmaQ]

I noticed the folder was being created when the browser is closed and looking at the prefs I see:

Code: Select all

toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled

However, after setting this to false the folder is still created. After looking around I found:

Preferences — Mozilla Source Tree Docs 41.0a1 documentation

Which says:

Allow pings to be archived locally. This can only be enabled if unified is on.

So, in addition to setting:

Code: Select all

toolkit.telemetry.enabled and toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled

to false, I also set:

Code: Select all

toolkit.telemetry.unified

to false. This seems to have stopped the folder/files being created.

[JayhawksRock]

Stop the Press for breaking news..Telemetry... been with us since Firefox 6
https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2011/05/ ... telemetry/
https://encrypted.google.com/search?sit ... 2g7SCN7cYs

[KarmaQ]

Stop the Press for breaking news..Telemetry... been with us since Firefox 6
https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2011/05/ ... telemetry/
https://encrypted.google.com/search?sit ... 2g7SCN7cYs

Really appreciate the update

[Drumbrake]

Let's see if I can drive this one home... I do realize Telemetry has been there for a while now, truth to tell I've even used it in the past thinking it could help development, before starting to realize it was more aimed at stunts like Directory Tiles and similar stuff.

What I'm writing about in this post is this saved-telemetry-pings folder that in Firefox beta 40 never goes away despite having (of course) reset everything I could in about:config

Code: Select all

user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled", false);
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.cachedClientID", "{}");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.enabled", false);
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.infoURL", "{}");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.previousBuildID", "{}");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.server", "{}");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.server_owner", "{}");
user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.unified", false);

the about:telemetry page also confirms that it is indeed disabled and there's no data to show (everything is greyed out), yet this folder (containing a file to which quite a lot of data is being written) is always re-created.

At least, until I've deleted said file and then set permissions for the saved-telemetry-pings directory to read-only -which shouldn't have been necessary at all.

On the other hand, after subsequently digging out of curiosity in about:telemetry in my regular profile for Firefox 39 release, I can see that -all other things been equal, as far settings go- there's no such directory (as it should be) but then not everything is greyed out, there is some data in that page and I can't figure out how it got there and how to get rid of it (where is it this stuff stored? in my profile somewhere that I can't figure out, or maybe out there "in the cloud" ???)

I'm not impressed, to say the least.

[Drumbrake]

And it goes on:

Code: Select all

WARNING: A blocker encountered an error while we were waiting.
          Blocker:  Waiting for ping task
          Phase: TelemetryController: Waiting for pending ping activity
          State: (none)
WARNING: Unix error 13 during operation open on file /home/.mozilla/firefox_profile/saved-telemetry-pings/g961f55c-8474-6fda-98f7-fd30y0cb2723.tmp (Permission denied)

Waiting for pending ping activity?

Has Mozilla perhaps decided that I must have Telemetry working in my profile, no matter which settings I choose?

[JayhawksRock]

Yup, Isn't Chronic Irrational Paranoia a terrible thing.... and a lot of work too.... Did you check to see if one of those blue and yellow Google cars is parked in front of your house. Some day they will be your ISP
https://fiber.google.com/about/
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=g ... rDedEZY%3D