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