“deletion-request” ping¶

This ping is submitted when a user opts out of sending technical and interaction data to Mozilla. (In other words, when the datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled preference is set to false.)

This ping contains the client id and profile group id. This ping does not contain any environment data.

This ping is intended to communicate to the Data Pipeline that the user wishes to have their reported Telemetry data deleted. As such it attempts to send itself at the moment the user opts out of data collection, and continues to try and send itself.

This ping contains scalars present in the “deletion-request” store.

Structure:

{
  version: 4,
  type: "deletion-request",
  ... common ping data (including clientId and profileGroupId)
  payload: {
    scalars: {
      <process-type>: { // like "parent" or "content"
        <id name>: <id>, // like "deletion.request.impression_id": "<RFC 4122 GUID>"
      },
    },
  }
}

Expected behaviours¶

The following is a list of expected behaviours for the deletion-request ping:

Telemetry will try to send the ping even if upload is disabled.
Telemetry may persist this ping if it can’t be immediately sent, and may try to resend it later.

Analysis Gotchas¶

It is known that, on a release week, “deletion-request” pings from the previous release version will spike in volume.

There is a strong geo component to these spikes (China and Russia mostly). The pings behave like they’re coming from real Firefox instances (one per client_id). However, we’ve received no “main” pings from these clients from the previous 28 days (per clients_last_seen) which makes them rather unusual.

We suspect this is some sort of automation or pseudo-automation.

Including these pings in our self-service deletion processes doesn’t make them any slower, and ingesting them isn’t breaking the bank, so at time of writing we’re inclined to take a “document and then ignore” approach.

Version History¶

Firefox 72:
- “deletion-request” ping replaces the “optout” ping (bug 1585410).
Firefox 73:
- Added support for subordinate ids in the “deletion-request” store (bug 1604312).