desktop-packages team mailing list archive

[Alberto Mardegan <1450168@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jamie, I think the privacy issue with the web cache is of a very
different scale from the one you could get from collecting the map data.
In the web cache you find visited websites, maybe with a lot of private
information about the user. In the cache maps, on the other hand, the
only information you can collect is a set of map tiles which might give
some hint on where the user lives or has been travelling to, but even
that with a lot of guesswork. I do see the issue, however.

There might be a solution, however: could we make give the apps the permission to only execute (traverse) the directories, and not read (enumerate) them?
In that way, it would not be possible for an app to get the list of the map tiles, while it would fulfil QtLocation caching needs (we know the file path of the tile we want to load, so we don't need read permissions on the directories).
Of course, an app could still try and read all the possible tiles one by one...

And if we go for the trusted prompt approach, what would be the action
to be performed if the user grants the access? Would creating a hard
link to ~/.cache/QtLocation from ~/.cache/<app>/QtLocation work?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1450168

Title:
  Map data should be shared between apps

Status in apparmor-easyprof-ubuntu package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in qtlocation-opensource-src package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  The libqtgeoservices_osm.so plugin gets loaded in the same process as
  the application using it, and stores all the map tiles into ~/.cache
  /<click-package>/

  This means that different apps will be unable to share the data,
  leading to wasted filesystem space.

  I suggest to modify the plugin so that:

  1) Tiles are stored in a common place (and apparmor rules are relaxed
  to allow read access to that): ~/.cache/libqtgeoservices_osm/, for
  example

  2) Tile downloads are managed by a separate service, started on
  demand.

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