GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 676577
There is not a place for the user to set Privacy or Security related options
Last modified: 2012-11-06 15:55:45 UTC
This options could be: - Local file indexing (for search of local files) - Diagnostics (distro needs anonymous data to improve the quality of the product) - Login password management - Filesystem encryption - Firewall - Location services per app
I quite like the idea of a security panel. It could contain: * Authentication settings for the user: require authentication? change password or authentication method (password/PIN/fingerprint etc) * Lock screen settings (lock the screen when away, set the delay, etc) Also, it could be interesting to talk about privacy wrt which apps are given access to online accounts and location services. (Whether that requires a separate settings panel is another question, though.) However, I don't see why we need some of the settings you have listed, nor why they are privacy issues. Most people don't know or care about file indexing or firewalls, and nor should they.
Allan, I think you should be distro agnostic, some distro like Ubuntu, relies heavily on indexing, for instance. I agree, Firewall shouldn't probably be there.
Two use cases for file indexing options: Steve has sensitive correspondence related to his company and he does not want the contents of those files to be showing up when he does normal file searches in public locations. Bobby has a collection of personal photos or videos that he does not want showing up in either Recent Files or in the search index. Both Bobby & Steve want a way to mark certain folders as non-indexable. Ubuntu's implementation gives the possibility of excluding all files of a certain type (such as pictures or spreadsheets), which is worth considering too.
I think Ubuntu has integrated zeitgeist's "activity log manager" (http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/activity-log-manager) in their control center. Maybe this would be a good place to start (add a "privacy" entry in the system settings if activity-log-manager is installed) I think password/login options can already be configured through the "User accounts" panel, that's a fine place in my opinion. As for firewall settings, why not add an entry if gufw is installed? After all it's GTK3 and integrates nicely in the desktop. Same goes for tracker's config panel (and maybe gnome-disk-utility for fs encryption). Why should they not be in the system settings panel? From the GNOME Library site: "The GNOME Control Center provides a central place for the user to setup their GNOME experience. It can let you configure anything from the behavior of your window borders to the default font type." Does GNOME experience includes having a secure and easily configurable system? Thanks
*** Bug 682821 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Carried over from Bug 682821: We need file indexing exclusion for the search as already mentioned, but exclusion from "Recently used" is equally important. While a guest account can solve things for lending the computer to others for a few minutes (but who has a guest account always ready on his laptop?), using the computer yourself with sensitive files showing up in the "Recently used" list or the search is still a problem. Therefore, IMHO the current tracker indexing options are not sufficient. They are too tracker specific: There should be some easy central "private files/locations" list that automatically excludes the files from the search indexer, the "Recently used" list, the tag generation (this one seems to be easily forgotten) and anything else zeitgeist-related (and whatever sort of indexers, "Recently used" lists, ... Gnome might come up with in the future).
This has been discussed in some detail at the Boston Summit. The current plans in this area are to have a number of new panels, to control various aspects of this: search, notification, privacy, sharing.
Bugs to track the new panels: * Sharing - bug 687772 * Privacy - bug 687774 * Search - bug 687490 I don't think we need this report any more.