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Privacy Preserving Product Analytics (P3A)

See original GitHub issue

Description

The implementation of Privacy Preserving Product Analytics (P3A) landed with https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/3242

More details on our blog here: https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/

Detailed list of the questions here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/P3A

Follow ups captured with: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6284

Android side captured with: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6176

Test plan

There is a bunch of command-line switches suitable to simplify the testing process (see https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/p3a/brave_p3a_switches.h), as well as detailed logs enabled as follows --vmodule=*/p3a/*=3 --enable-logging=stderr

The possible command-line for testing might look as follows: brave --vmodule=*/p3a/*=3 --enable-logging=stderr --p3a-upload-interval-seconds=5 --p3a-rotation-interval-seconds=160 --p3a-upload-server-url="http://127.0.0.1/" --p3a-ignore-server-errors --p3a-do-not-randomize-upload-interval

This way, we decrease the interval between sending values, disable randomization of this interval, and decrease the interval between restarting the whole process from 1 week to 160 seconds. Note that there is an initial silent period of 60 seconds (probably we should also add a switch to disable it). Also, in case of unsuccessful upload there is a retry logic with backoff interval of 5 seconds multiplied by 2 after each upload failure.

Last recorded values are saved in local state and can be found by p3a key on brave://local-state