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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