Re: [Usability] time stamps and privacy

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 01:38 -0400, Caleb Marcus wrote:
> Can you explain how the thumbnails are a privacy breach?

It's explained in the link.  Quote:

  I have some sensitive images on media. I am on the road
  and I use a guest account on a third party’s computer to
  access a file on that media. Thumbnails are generated and
  left behind on the third party computer to be harvested!
  I wonder how many users are aware of this potential
  security risk, and if there is a way to prevent it.

Of course, you should always think twice about plugging a
drive with sensitive files into a random machine.  I could
load some sort of auto-media-sniffer onto my laptop and let
people use it.  Trust is, as always, the first hurdle.

But with thumbnails, even if you trust the person not to
be *explicitly* sniffing your data, it's happening anyway
by the thumbnailer.

Frankly, if you have sensitive data on a portable drive,
you should really encrypt that drive.  And then Nautilus
should never ever ever create thumbnails of files on an
encrypted volume and store them on another volume.  Nor
should Beagle or Tracker create indexes of files on an
encrypted volume and store them elsewhere.  et cetera.

--
Shaun

> On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 01:13 -0400, Yuval Levy wrote: 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I am not sure if this is the right place to discuss these two issues, 
> > but I feel they are important enough. As a tentative convert from 
> > Windows (still dual booting, though with an increasingly share on the 
> > Ubuntu/Gnome side of the divide) I have come across two potential deal 
> > killers:
> > 
> > time stamps: I know I can use cp -p, but is there a similar 
> > functionality in Nautilus? and if there is, why isn't it default?
> > <http://panospace.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/i-want-my-time-stamps-back/>
> > 
> > privacy: making thumbnails of every inserted media to a folder in the 
> > user's home folder is a privacy breach. are those making the design 
> > decisions aware of it? if so, has there been a discussion of the 
> > benefits, alternatives and trade-offs? is there an option I am not aware 
> > of to disable thumbnail caching for some or all media?
> > <http://panospace.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/i-want-my-privacy-back/>
> > 
> > thanks
> > Yuv
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