Product-owner decision, 2026-08-27: the analytical need is stable
cross-window identity (retention curves, longitudinal install
behaviour), which the rotating pseudonym destroyed by design. The
feature has not shipped - zero consented users, zero production
transmissions - so identity semantics can change without breaking any
promise made to a user; existing (dev-only) consent windows carry
forward unchanged.
Removed in full rather than weakened in place:
- shared_metrics_identity.py (salt generation/rotation, HMAC-SHA256
derivation, payload substitution) and its 19-test file.
- The sender's derivation step. _freeze_identity keeps its validation
role (unreadable/non-object/id-less payloads still reject rather than
block the queue) and now records the raw install_id in
sent_install_id; _body rewrites the payload's install_id from that
frozen column, keeping byte-identical resends anchored to one
recorded value.
Consent surface updated in the same change: the setup wizard now states
plainly that packages carry the stable profile-scoped install ID (a
random UUID, no personal information, reset by deleting the
shared-metrics directory). No consent was ever collected under the old
wording in any shipped build.
Docs A.2/A.3 rewritten as decision records rather than silently
edited: A.2 records what is transmitted now and states the
consequences plainly (indefinite cross-package correlation is the
designed behaviour); A.3 records why rotation existed and why its
removal was accepted. The main-body "must not reuse the persistent
local identifier by default" escape hatch is exercised, not deleted:
that paragraph required exactly this product decision, which has now
been made. A.6's deletion note updated: install_id is now itself the
lookup key, so a future delete-on-request needs only a service-side
API, not a mapping.
Tests: the two privacy assertions invert deliberately
(test_the_stable_install_id_is_transmitted_as_is and the e2e wire
variant); freezing/byte-identical-retry coverage unchanged. Staging
E2E script now asserts transmitted == install_id.
258 targeted tests pass; ruff + footguns clean; both staging E2E
harnesses green with the raw id observed on the wire (202s).
Responds to the independent PR review (andrexibiza). Both P1s were
checked against current HEAD rather than taken on authority - the
review was written against 613849c190, before the interval-model
consent replacement landed.
P1-1 (same-UTC-day revoke/re-enable releases refused data): already
fixed by the interval model. The reviewer's exact reproduction - opt in
06:00, revoke 12:00, package collected 18:00, re-enable 20:00 same day
- was re-run at HEAD: the off-window package stays local, and a full-day
aggregate straddling the revocation boundary also stays local (period
containment, timestamp precision). The consent-windows harness already
pins both. The reviewer's related ask that consent-ledger persistence
failures fail closed also holds structurally now: reconciliation derives
state rather than recording transitions, so a lost write means a shorter
confirmed horizon - less is released, never more.
P1-2 (lease has no owner) was VALID at head. Reproduced exactly as
described: A claims, is suspended past the 300s lease, B reclaims and
POSTs, A resumes and POSTs again - and the ingest key is minute-
prefixed, so the duplicate lands as a DISTINCT stored object, making
this worse than a benign idempotent overwrite.
Fix: every claim now mints a claim_token (additive nullable column,
schema version unchanged). Ownership is revalidated immediately before
every external POST, and every settlement, rejection, and backoff write
is compare-and-set on (package_id, claim_token, pending). A lapsed
claimant that resumes yields without transmitting, and its stale
backoff cannot move next_attempt_at under the live claim's lease.
Two deterministic regressions ship with it: expiry -> reclaim -> resume
(the reviewer's schedule), and the subtler stale-backoff-clobber case.
Honest scope, documented on _send_one: delivery remains at-least-once.
The token closes the claim->POST gap; a suspension landing mid-POST
(bytes already on the wire) is not client-revocable. The residual
duplicate is byte-identical content; collapsing it fully needs
package_id-keyed dedupe at the ingest service.
275 tests pass; ruff + footguns clean; staging E2E 202.
Structural fix after five review rounds put four blockers in the same
subsystem. The root cause was representational: consent history is a
sequence of on/off intervals, but it was stored as ONE moving day-stamp
plus a revoked flag. Every fix had to mutate that scalar at exactly the
right moment from exactly the right place, and each round the mutation
was missing from some reachable path (write-once stamp in R3; recorded
inside a loop that never runs when sending is off in R4; dead code
whenever collection was off in R5).
Consent is now recorded as explicit intervals (send_consent_windows) and
eligibility is a pure derivation: a package is sent only when its whole
period falls inside a recorded window. One writer -
reconcile_send_consent - derives window state from an observation of
(config, now). It is idempotent and order-independent, so the wizard,
the relay, and the mid-pass check all call the same function and cannot
disagree; there are no edges to detect and no ordering between writers
to get wrong. The relay reconciles once per process BEFORE the
collection gate, which fixes round-5 D1 (enabled:false made the only
idle-path observer unreachable). The claim reads the table and never
writes it, removing the read-path mutation (D2's rewrite vector).
Timestamp discipline, each rule load-bearing and mutation-tested:
- 'obs' high-water mark: monotonic, advanced only by observations;
confirms an open window forward (last_confirmed_at).
- 'data' high-water mark: advanced only by stored package period_end;
clamps window OPENS so a rolled-back clock cannot slide a window
under refused packages already on disk (round-5 D2).
- A close stamps last_confirmed_at, never "now": consent is asserted
only for observed time, so a hand-edited config with no process
running for 90 days fails closed (round-5 D1 strongest form).
- The gate requires period containment, not period_start >=, so an
intra-day revoke/re-enable holds back the day package (round-5 D3).
- Unlike the day-stamp, a revoke/re-enable cycle no longer destroys the
undelivered backlog from the earlier consented window (round-5 D4).
The redesign was validated BEFORE implementation against all 13
reproduced defect scenarios on a real store; the first two drafts each
failed scenarios in that harness (v1 leaked the unobserved-gap case by
closing at "now"; v2 leaked refused windows by letting data stamps
confirm consent). The harness ships as
tests/hermes_cli/test_shared_metrics_consent_windows.py.
Deleted: OPT_IN_PERIOD_KEY, SEND_REVOKED_KEY, LAST_SEEN_SEND_KEY,
opt_in_period(), record_revoked(), the relay edge detector body, and the
setup wizard's key bookkeeping (~170 lines of transition machinery).
Schema: two additive tables, version deliberately unchanged; verified
against a copy of the real production DB (13 rows intact, reopen no-op).
Also kills round-5's M8 survivor: the seen-exclusion mutation now fails
the suite. New mutation sweep: 8/8 killed, including one vacuous test of
my own this round (obs-mark monotonicity was covered only by
coincidence of the data mark; now pinned directly).
Documented cost: a fresh package waits at most one process start after
its period completes before release (fail-closed direction).
270 tests pass; ruff and windows-footguns clean. Staging E2E re-run
through the interval gate: both packages 202.
Step 1+2 of the shared-metrics exporter.
Config: telemetry.shared_metrics.send (default false) and .endpoint
(default production), resolved by a new shared_metrics_send_config
module. Precedence is HERMES_TELEMETRY_ENDPOINT > config > default; the
env var exists so the live staging E2E never has to mutate a user's
config. send requires enabled and never implies it — that combination
is a misconfiguration the user believes is working, so it logs an ERROR
once per process rather than silently doing nothing. Plaintext
endpoints are refused unless the host is loopback, so a typo cannot
send telemetry in clear text.
Per AGENTS.md, outbound telemetry needs a user-facing opt-in, so
setup_telemetry now prompts for sending as a second, separate question
and force-disables send when collection is turned off.
Storage: six additive nullable columns on package_outbox for send
bookkeeping. The store schema version deliberately does NOT move —
_ensure_schema_in_transaction raises on any version it does not
recognise and has no forward-compatibility branch, so bumping it would
hard-fail an older Hermes, a second profile on an older build, or a
rollback, against the same file. Old readers select named columns and
never SELECT *, so the additions are invisible to them.
Also corrects the two places that promised telemetry is never uploaded
(config_defaults comment and cli-config.yaml.example); leaving them
would make them false privacy statements once sending ships.
Tests: 26 covering config precedence, the enabled/send relationship,
transport safety, fresh-database creation, upgrade from a pre-send
database (rows preserved, version pinned, idempotent), and that the
shipped export query still runs. Mutation-checked: bumping the schema
version fails 5 of them.
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