unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick,

Privacy is important to myself, and the Ubuntu community in general.
Probably one of the best ways that you can continue to raise these
issues at the appropriate UDS sessions, which fortunately is happening
right now!  You can find a list of sessions and how to connect to them
remotely right here:

   http://summit.ubuntu.com

Let me talk about a couple specific things:

On Mon, 2012-10-29 at 23:58 -0400, nick rundy wrote:
> The Amazon ads are just the latest example however. The problem was
> seen in 12.04 with the geoclue-ubuntu-geoip package. This package
> is/was a major privacy issue with no solution. There is no way to
> uninstall this package from 12.04 without loosing Time in the
> top-panel. 


The Ubuntu GeoIP application got a GSettings key in 12.10 that allows
setting the URL that it looks up the GeoIP information from.  If you
clear this value, it will not be able to find the function and will
remain dormant.  That being said I don't think that this is a large
privacy hole in that it only connects to a service on the Internet, I
would hope that you feel you can trust Canonical as much as other
services that you get from the Internet including every iframe on a
random website.


> Essentially, Ubuntu needs to do two things:
> 1) make privacy/security a important consideration in all new features
> while giving users the option of making the Dash a completely LOCAL
> feature.


Also in 12.10 there is a switch on the Privacy panel to say "When
searching in the Dash: Include online search results."  When that is
switched, only local results should be used.  If you find a lens or
scope that violates that setting, please report a bug!


> 2) create an Application Firewall for Ubuntu so that users can
> effectively discover what applications are making connections to the
> internet. 


We've talked about that a lot this week with regards to App Confinement.
I hope that you'll be able to dial into the sessions and participate in
UDS to help us ensure that these concerns are taken into account.

        --Ted

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