Re: [Usability] time stamps and privacy

[Yuval Levy <gnome08 sfina com>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> Frankly, if you have sensitive data on a portable drive,
> you should really encrypt that drive.

tell that to digital camera manufacturers. IIRC Nikon and a few other 
manufacturers do encrypt part of their RAW files, but that's only a 
pathetic attempt to conceal some esoteric settings that are meant to 
yield better images than the competition.

The "portable drive" in question is a compact flash straight out of the 
digital camera, encryption not under user control. Besides, I am happy 
the images as such are not encrypted. If they were the first consequence 
would be to hamper interoperability with Linux (given how cooperative 
most camera manufacturers are).


> 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.

Good thinking. No need to treat non-encrypted volumes differently. the 
user has decided - explicitly or implicitly - to put the file on a 
specific volume. this choice should apply by default also to all related 
metadata including thumbs, unless there is a very good reason to 
override this choice in which case the user should be at least informed 
on first use (don't expect the user to be aware of design decisions that 
make Gnome different than mainstream desktops) and given finer grained 
control. Right now I can only tell Nautilus not to create thumbnails at 
all - even just a choice by volume type (local/network/removable) would 
be a massive improvement.

Yes, I know, next thing you will tell me to submit a patch. I wish I 
could. My coding skills are close to zero and I don't know Gnome's 
codebase at all. I would not even know were to start. And my time is 
limited. I can do analysis if that can be of use.

Yuv