Allow postponing event captures until User Consent is collected

[bruno-garcia]

Have the SDK operate ‘properly’, with it's configured features such as Replay. But ‘hold off’ on sending events until consent is given. If revoked stop events from being sent again.

Sentry Native already supports user consent (not for all backends though), we can borrow the idea and do something similar getsentry/sentry-native@a51ccbb/src/sentry_options.c#L276-L286

Relates to:

• User Consent team-mobile#24

Specifically:

• Consider per-report Consent Checking sentry-native#110
• User Consent - Allow manual sending of events sentry-cocoa#1780
• User consent support sentry-java#1988
• User Consent support sentry-dotnet#1603
• User consent sentry-unity#1044

There's an internal doc that should be moved to GitHub.

[bruno-garcia]

@AbhiPrasad any notes on why we decided not to go ahead with this?

[AbhiPrasad]

Nope, I think it just fell through the cracks. I moved it to Archived since it was a stale-bot closed issue. We can re-open and backlog!

[zemlanin]

Hi. What is expected way of handling user consent until this issue is resolved?

Add <script>/call Sentry.init only after user has agreed to gathering analytics? Something else?

[lforst]

@zemlanin Calling Sentry.init() only when consent was given is one way to do it. Another would be to delay events in the transport, that way you would not lose events that happened before the user gave consent. But that is a bit more involved.

[timfish]

The offline transports have hooks that can allow you to queue events until user consent.

[dervondenbergen]

The offline transports have hooks that can allow you to queue events until user consent.

@timfish What kind of offline transport hooks do you mean? I tried to find them in the docs but wasn't able to.

[timfish]

Sorry, I was mistaken. I just checked the docs and it looks like the browser offline transport doesn't support the hooks required to delay sending events. It only has a shouldStore callback.

The Electron offline transport has an additional shouldSend callback which can be used to delay/stop sending. We need to look into adding that to the base makeOfflineTransport code.

[dervondenbergen]

@timfish No problem, I tried to read through the Electron offline transport code but can't figure out, wether/where the stored envelopes get flushed.

Or does a falsy shouldSend simply store the envelopes away and they get never send to Sentry as soon as shouldSend ist truthy again 🤔

[timfish]

They get stored until another envelope is sent and shouldSend returns true. Once one envelope is sent successfully the rest are attempted.

There is also an option to attempt flushing shortly after startup.