Re: Designing "Finding and Reminding"

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 16:24 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> What about privacy?  Maybe certain activities you don't want showing
> up.. for instance, if you're at a conference you don't want people
> behind you knowing what you were looking at.  That kind of thing?
>
> Respecting "private browsing" mode on browser is one method.  There
> might be other ways to respect that.  Domain based filtering as well.
> Clearly, I don't want my boss to know that I've been busy at
> www.gnome.org during work hours and so forth.

I think we can distinguish two cases:

1. Not wanting some things to be logged at all.

2. Having things logged, but not wanting casual observers to see that
you did something in the past.

The first case is probably easier.  During "private browsing", the
browser can simply avoid logging its pages in Zeitgeist.  You can also
have a blacklist.  In short - it's easy in principle to ensure that
something is not logged - you either don't log it, or you filter it out
before it gets logged.

The Zeitgeist hackers were recently working on a blacklist manager.  I
don't know all the details; you'll do better in asking them.

The second case needs to be done carefully.  If we had taggable files,
we could let you keep files with certain tags from being shown - like
the default "Hidden" tag in F-spot for your furniture pictures.  It may
be easy enough to hide "web pages" even if they are not tagged;
Zeitgeist already knows that they came from a web browser.

I think, for now, we should only concentrate on the first case -
ensuring that unwanted things don't get logged.  The second case is, in
a way, *already* a problem - if someone peeks over your shoulder while
you read your mail, well, you may have a problem.

In the Zeitgeist development list, I posted about privacy a while ago -
http://lists.zeitgeist-project.com/pipermail/dev/2011-March/000210.html
- you may want to take a look.  One idea I'm kind of liking is this
(quoting from that mail):

> Another, more sophisticated thing would be to have apps actually notify
> the user when they log something, as unobtrusively as possible.  Say I
> open an image in EOG and it shows "Saved ~/Pr0n/deine-mudda.jpg in your
> journal" in the status bar, along with a button "remove this from the
> journal").  That may be overkill; I'm not sure; and if g-a-j allows easy
> sanitization it may not be needed at all.  But it would probably give
> some people peace of mind if they knew *what* is being logged as soon as
> it happens.

(Another idea is to have a ~/Private from which things never get logged.
Again, see more ideas in that mail.)

  Federico