For examples of similar plugin telemetry probes, see bug 722110 (count how often plugins are activated) and bug 1207785 (count how many embedded YouTube Flash movies users see).

Elvin, do you have any concerns on us collecting telemetry to count the number of Flash ads that users see? All telemetry data is be publicly visible on https://telemetry.mozilla.org/. We already collect telemetry related to Flash content (metadata like height and width), but here we would be specifically counting ads. I usually ask Mika my data collection questions, but she is out on maternity leave. On further thought, we might be able to approximate the number of Flash ads from our existing Flash telemetry because we can look for the standard banner ad sizes. The advantage of this approach is that we can look at past data, before and after Google threatened to start blocking Flash ads in Chrome.

Hi Chris, have you already discussed this with your data steward or opened a privacy bug? Better to address any concerns there first before I weigh in.

Benjamin, as project sponsor and data steward for Unified Telemetry, do you have any concerns about publicly reporting telemetry on Flash ads? I don't think ad networks would consider it proprietary data because we would be aggregating metadata on all Flash ads, just tracking individual ad networks.

No, no concerns. The actual data review comes at the end of the process, but there is a clear user benefit and monitoring strategy for this data already so the final approval should be simple.

We don't think we need this telemetry because we have data from Bob Clary's SWF crawl of the Alexa Top 100,000 sites.