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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

Apple are just as bad as Microsoft. And some Linux distro's are headed in this direction too (Ubuntu).

I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple is "as bad as Microsoft" in this regard quite yet.

Agree! Ubuntu and similar, along with zeitgeist pre-installed, do exactly the same.

As far as I know, Zeitgeist doesn't send that information to anywhere (it's kept in the computer), so I don't see how it's even nearly the same.

I don't like the bloat, but I don't see it as more privacy invading than any other system logs.

Zeitgeist stores your information on it's datahub, where 3rd party applications can retrieve it from. Nothing prevents such applications from sending this information elsewhere, once accessed.

As this comes out-of-the-box by default, and is in fact a pain to switch off, I compare it to this new windows behavior.

All your criticisms apply to syslogd as well: it stores your information in a central location (/var/log), which 3rd party applications can read and upload to somewhere else, and lots of software expects it to be there, so it can be a pain to switch off too.

Should we compare syslogd to the new Windows behaviour?

A normal user application, i.e. firefox, should not have access /var/log/messages. The zeitgeist db can be queried by any application running with the users privilege. Although to be fair the fedora 22 installation I'm running allows me read the logs launching journalctl as a user, so there's that. I don't think zeitgeist has much to do with the Windows behaviour (or with the scopes behaviour). It's just a potential security risk, albeit a minor one.

A normal user application, i.e. firefox, should not have access /var/log/messages. The zeitgeist db can be queried by any application running with the users privilege.

Zeitgeist itself runs with the users privilege (it's not a system daemon, it's started by the user's session), so that hypothetical application could simply log the data itself. There's no leak of information to underprivileged processes.

I know that, what I meant was that there is information stored about the past, that a malicious application could not get otherwise (i.e. it can record stuff only from the moment it is installed).

On similar note, I rememember someone arguing that the baloo/nepomuk db was a security threat, I guess since it makes slightly easier to search among the files on the system for a string like "password".

Both claims are technically true, and in neither case I believe they are practically relevant, neither for security nor for privacy. I was nitpicking, I guess.

I was referring to user data, not program data/log (despite it can as well containing some user data in some way).

Syslogd can be compared to windows event logs.

What guidelines should I go by when checking out a Linux distro to see if it is in the same ballpark or not?

Usually, free software comes with privacy and privacy comes with free software, so the first thing that you should look for is the distribution's policies on free software. Distributions like Debian and Fedora, for example, have a strong commitment to free software (see Debian's Social Contract[0] and Fedora's licensing guidelines[1]) and are not going to spy on you or put ads on your system. The Free Software Foundation maintains a list of distributions that contain only free software[2], and these distributions aren't going to collect your data and send it to third parties without your consent either.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, does not have such a commitment to free software, and has included Amazon ads in the Unity dash in the past.

[0]: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main

[2]: https://gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

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