Moving Baloo forward

[Kevin Krammer]

On Wednesday, 2014-01-29, 00:06:11, Ingo Klöcker wrote:

> I don't think it makes sense to work around a social problem (uneducated
> users) by using an inferior and much more complex technical solution
> (some database instead of xattrs). IMHO the advantages of using xattrs
> (e.g. we get easy synchronization and backup of metadata for free)
> outweigh the possibility that some people might inadvertently publish
> private metadata. People need to be educated that they have to use their
> brains when they share stuff. And we need to make sharing stuff (with
> built-in privacy protection) as easy as possible.

As you pointed out below, most sharing technologies automatically discard 
xattrs anyway.

The only sharing option that would not that I can come up with is having a 
shared directory on a filesystem with xattrs support.
The question for that is whether it is not the administrator responsibility to 
set it up without xattrs support if privacy between sharing parties is a 
concern.

> Moreover, the risk for privacy is significantly lower than with metadata
> that is stored in the file itself (as in your MS Word document example).
> In contrast to metadata stored in MS Word documents, metadata stored in
> xattrs will not be leaked if you share the file via mail or by uploading
> it to Facebook or by copying it on a (FAT32-formatted) USB-stick.
> Apparently, Dropbox supports xattrs, but IMHO it's Dropbox's
> responsibility to provide a setting to disable synchronization of file
> metadata.

My guess would be that DropBox or any other synchronisation service only does 
that for sync clients, not when enabling "outside" access to the same data.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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