The perils of desktop tracking [LWN.net]

The perils of desktop tracking

Posted Apr 21, 2012 4:46 UTC (Sat) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959)
In reply to: The perils of desktop tracking by drag
Parent article: The perils of desktop tracking

> Zeitgeist may simplify things a bit, but only slightly. Not having it running or installed isn't really going to help you out much against malicious software tracking you, recording your activities, and finding historical data.

Sorry but I'm not buying this. Zeitgeist makes it possible for malware that came in *later* to find everything that happened *already*.

I may go to a conference where I realise a few minutes after logging in that I am on an untrusted network or whatever. I quickly shutdown and stop using it (or switch to a live USB), till I can go home and clean up.

Without ZG the malware has those few minutes to trawl my $HOME and get whatever it can out of the mess there. With ZG it knows what is important to me, and can find it faster and pull only that out much more efficiently.

ZG gives me *yet* another reason to avoid Ubuntu.

Thank God for Fedora.

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