It's just our internal jargon, nothing nefarious intended. Things shipped over Shield are called "studies," A/B tests in the installer are called "funnelcakes," etc.

Are you saying that you're communicating the word "studies" in place of "advertisement" when the Shield option is presented to users during installation of Firefox?

This is the first time that channel has been so misused. I participated for a long while, and stopped some months ago only because the studies I was getting weren't useful to me and tended to impair my experience, rather than because of any issue of trustworthiness. I certainly am less likely to reenable the shield channel now than previously, but I also don't see the sense in making more out of this than the already eminently sufficient debacle that it is.

While I agree, in this case I think he's just using the phrase from the end of the blog post.