user_id has stopped working

[Niall Muldoon]

Hi!

I have an issue with the user_id User property, it is suddenly never shown in either the Firebase DebugView or listed inside the raw data in BigQuery. This was working fine on 21st January, but has broken at some point since... I have not changed any code that would break this (I have even synced the project back in source control to a time when it was definitely working and made new builds).

This is the environment we are running:
- Unity 2021.3.17
- Firebase SDK 11.6.0.

I have confirmed that we are setting the User ID in code both by stepping through in the debugger and also by using the verbose logging (https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/events?platform=android#view_events_in_the_android_studio_debug_log). It is definitely being set to the correct value, it has just suddenly stopped working and I am unsure why. I haven't changed any code in our project that would cause it to stop working.

Other user properties (set via FirebaseAnalytics.SetUserProperty) are working correctly, see the "user_age" in the DebugView in the attached image.

Can anyone else confirm things are working correctly for them or are seeing the same issue as me?

Thank you!

[Niall Muldoon]

I have managed to "break" the quick start app in the same way by enabling "User-provided data collection". This feature is currently in open beta and the docs say:

"After enabling user-provided data collection, user IDs will not be available in event-level and user-level data that BigQuery exports. User-IDs in exports with user-provided data collection enabled will be supported later on in open beta."

There is also some rather important information in the docs about this feature which I really think should be a top level warning where you enable the feature:

• "This feature is intended for properties with web data streams. At this time, we do not recommend it if you have an app data stream."
  • We are collecting analytics from a game built in Unity, so it looks like we should not have switched this on.
• "Note that acknowledging the feature policy is permanent and will result in the following changes to your property. Though you can disable user-provided data collection from your tag, the following changes cannot be undone and should be reviewed before acknowledging the policy:"
  • It's a bit crazy that this is a one way journey!

I appear now to be stuck with this feature turned on for our app which is breaking our user_id collection. I never would have turned this on if there had been a top level warning about this feature and the changes being irreversible :(

[Aditya]

Hi Niall,

We encountered the exact same problem around 29 Jan. I discovered important information in hindsight too.

Could you please let me know if you manage to find a fix for this? It's causing some disruptions on our end as well.

Thanks!

[Niall Muldoon]

I was not able to fix this issue. I did reach out to Firebase support, but they told me to open a ticket with Google Analytics instead as they are just a wrapper. I have not done this yet.

As we are pre-release, I think the easiest option for us will be to delete everything and start again. I've been holding out on that though as it will take time and the experimental feature documentation does say user_id support is coming at some point...

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[Aditya]

I understand. We had fallbacks, so with some changes our pipelines remained un-disrupted. I will open a ticket with Google Analytics for this. I'll post here if something turns up.

Thanks