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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

After the last PR disaster - the Mr Robot tie-in - one of the ways Mozilla tried to make it right was that they promised that the survey system would never again be used for something that was not an experiment.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/retrospective-looking-glass...

> A SHIELD study must be designed to answer a specific question.

Why have they abused it again here to deploy a hot fix, breaking their promise and policy that they put in place last time they messed up?

Or am I ignorant or some part of the story or technical details.

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I think using the system they used to provide a hotfix for a browser-breaking issue does not clash with the spirit of their prior pledge.

I feel a complaint like this verges unhelpfully in to the pedantic.

Yeah I agree with you on this one. Especially because as another user posted earlier, they are going through and deleting all telemetry and usage statistics for their entire user base during the time period that this was needed to be enabled.

This seems like a very good compromise and is honestly more than they needed to do imo

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-thi...

As someone who opted out of Studies after the last abuse, I felt betrayed that my addons were, effectively, held hostage behind enabling both telemetry and Studies. I decided to wait.

It’s bad optics at the very least. Users who opted in for the update were in fact entered into studies they explicitly wouldn’t have wanted to be in without the lure of an earlier update.

I'm sorry that you felt like you were held hostage by Telemetry/Studies. With the exception of the hotfix, we disabled rolling out new Studies during the incident, and will not be re-enabling them until some time after Monday next week.

We are also completely deleting all Telemetry and Studies data received in the week following the incident to ensure we respect people who had concerns like yours, but enabled Studies in order to receive the hotfix.

Specific details and timestamps are in the post at https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-thi...

That is excellent news!

"I'm sorry that you felt like you were..." is the worst form of apology, because it admits no guilt or responsibility. "I'm sorry that you were..." or "I'm sorry that we..." would be a legitimate apology.

That said, nuking this data is the first good thing Mozilla has done in this whole fiasco. It's a small but real act of contrition, so kudos for that.

> "I'm sorry that you felt like you were..." is the worst form of apology, because it admits no guilt or responsibility. "I'm sorry that you were..." or "I'm sorry that we..." would be a legitimate apology.

GP used the word "felt" and was expressing that he felt a certain way about enabling Studies. You're nit-picking a conversation and it has gone like this:

A: I felt that $x.

B: I'm sorry that you felt that $x.

C: "I'm sorry that you felt ..." is an insincere apology.

Yes, some people use this trick to get out of admitting guilt or responsibility but this is not an example of that.

It is an insincere apology though, because it apologizes for something "you" are doing and not something "I" am doing. An acceptable way to apologize to "I felt that..." is "I'm sorry I made you feel like...".

And that's the minimum. Anything less than that is shifting the blame.

From another Mozilla blog post about the incident response:

> "In order to respect our users’ potential intentions as much as possible, based on our current set up, we will be deleting all of our source Telemetry and Studies data for our entire user population collected between 2019-05-04T11:00:00Z and 2019-05-11T11:00:00Z."

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-thi...

I agree. And Mozilla somewhat addresses this in their second lessons learned:

> [...] we need a mechanism to be able to quickly push updates to our users even when — especially when — everything else is down. It was great that we are able to use the Studies system, but it was also an imperfect tool that we pressed into service, and that had some undesirable side effects. In particular, we know that many users have auto-updates enabled but would prefer not to participate in Studies and that’s a reasonable preference [...] but at the same time we need to be able to push updates to our users

Its a difficult situation to be in: Some users do not want any changes being applied automatically, but when something breaks, changes need to be applied. It sounds like the Firefox team is doing everything they can with respect to both ends of the spectrum.

Before reaching out to words like "abuse" for what is ultimately a hotfix, perhaps you should read the article. In particular:

> Second, we need a mechanism to be able to quickly push updates to our users even when — especially when — everything else is down. It was great that we are able to use the Studies system, but it was also an imperfect tool that we pressed into service, and that had some undesirable side effects. In particular, we know that many users have auto-updates enabled but would prefer not to participate in Studies and that’s a reasonable preference (true story: I had it off as well!) but at the same time we need to be able to push updates to our users; whatever the internal technical mechanisms, users should be able to opt-in to updates (including hot-fixes) but opt out of everything else.

I have read the article - and accusing users of not doing so is against the site guidelines here by the way.

Mozilla previously told us

> we have created a set of principles that we will always follow when shipping a SHIELD study to our users, and two principles are most relevant to this situation.

> A SHIELD study must be designed to answer a specific question.

What question did this hot fix answer? None. So what’s the point in the policy and promise if they’re doing to disregard it. It was supposed to be there to stop what went wrong last time. It’s like they disabled a safety put in after the last bad accident.

I think the reason was probably that the vast majority of Firefox users, if asked, would prefer that they did this. Not too many would say, "I am willing to participate in your study, but please don't fix my browser's add-ons if they all break". Sure, approval might not be 100%, but it would be something well north of 90%, and they probably took the right action.

Given, of course, that the truly right action of not letting the certificate expire in the first place, was no longer possible.

Not sure if you want a browser that emphasis privacy and security, that you will also want to have remote code injections as a way to ship an update that affects the way add-ons security work.

> the reason was probably that the vast majority of Firefox users, if asked, would prefer that they did this

I’m sure they thought the same about the Mr Robot addon, but their judgement was wrong so this policy was put in place.

The SHIELD policies they promulgated after that incident has to do with studies. This was not a study. This was an emergency band-aid to help as many users as possible get their browsers back to the way they (the users) chose to make them work by re-enabling their add-ons, using the fastest avenue available.

This was a user-friendly move, and while it's unfortunate that it was necessary in the first place, your criticism reads like a "gotcha."

> This was not a study.

I don’t get it. Distributing something that was not a study as a study was what upset people last time. So they promised not to do it again. And they have just done it again.

Perhaps people were upset last time because it was for commercial purposes, rather than as an emergency fix to help people to get their browser working.

The outrage over looking glass was because it was an unwanted advertisement/promotion being pushed as a 'study'

In this case, they were pushing a hotfix for a critical issue effecting all firefox users. It was only pushed through the studies system because it was the best option to get the fix to as many users as possible while they worked on a firefox update.

Implying that this is in any way equivalent to looking glass is completely disingenuous.

> Distributing something that was not a study as a study was what upset people last time.

People got upset because an add-on for a commercial TV series auto-magically installed itself in their browser without their manual intervention.

You can't just abstract that out into an ethics framework of, "If Firefox sends non-X over a channel reserved for X, then users get upset." I mean, you can, but you're going to be rightly confused and misunderstood.

Do they have a better channel for deploying hot-fixes? Maybe I'm a bit of a squish but I'm pretty agnostic of how they deploy fixes to me so long as my addons start working again.

They don't currently, but adding a better channel to deploy hotfixes is something that's specifically mentioned in this article...

It is indeed a huge violation of trust.

I’ve seen some folks trying to explain it away and compare the Normandy preference system to standard auto-updates, acting like this is no problem if you already trust them for auto-updates.

Flat wrong. This is a dark pattern by Mozilla pure & simple. It’s confusing, hard to disable fully, and clearly can be abused for non-experiment modifications to the user’s settings.

Mozilla has gone full "helicopter parent" mode, and will do whatever they can to keep you safe from yourself despite your wishes. Use GNU icecat instead. It has all that junk turned off.

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