On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 at 10:37:58 AM UTC-7, Doug Thayer wrote: > Sticking to the farting analogy, it would be more like a methane > detector in a > large building. If one person farts, really we couldn't tell since we > couldn't > distinguish between one fart and regular fluctuations in the methane content > of the air. However, if lots of people are farting, we should be able to > estimate roughly how many farts are happening in a given time period. I > think > it's important to make this distinction, because it means that we can only > observe _common_ behaviors of the crowd, while deviant behaviors of an > individual can _never_ be observed.
Hi Doug, Thanks for the response. I definitely wrote that when I haven't understood RAPPOR as well, so I apologize for that quick trigger response. Reading the RAPPOR paper more, it looks like it does think through the case I was alluding to. The situation I was worried about is multiple collections and over a period of time. Yes, one participation in the methane detection test might not reveal much. But what's being asked is the automatic participation in all subsequent tests. The RAPPOR paper does talk about this situation and does have cautions needed to accurately mitigate these. Especially things like multiple accidental participations. (install Firefox, install Firefox nightly for example) I guess it's impossible for me to actually drill into whether Firefox's implementation would have all the cases covered. But just to say that what's asked is still the automatic trust of all and future behaviors (of the implementation). _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
