[Bug 80899] gnome-about-me has no documentation

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

Currently there is no easily-accessible information about what exactly
the gnome-about-me applet does with the information it is supplied with.

There is a Help button that is unimplemented (it prints "Help goes here"
on the console). I searched for 15 minutes on Google and I still
couldn't find anything about it, except some bug reports that mention
it.

Especially in this age of social engineering, spam & spyware -- though
Linux is not yet much affected by the latter -- and all sorts of privacy
abuse I think we should be very careful to train our users to be
security conscious.

Right now the applet is just an invitation for users to give away a lot
of private information, without any explanation as to what that
information is used to and what applications have access to it.

As I assume the applet isn't doing anything much for now, there should
be at least a help window telling people that. If there is any support
for an application to retrieve the information there (e.g. DBUS) I think
it is a priority that work should be done on basic privacy measures.

(e.g., the user should be able to choose what info is public (thus
easily accessible for every program, for instance Gaim) and what info is
not (thus programs may request it, and the user is asked to confirm).
The private part, at least, should be encrypted in some way.)

I really look up to just entering my photo once and having it available
on any chat/phone/etc application that I may install, without having to
remember where I put it.


Come to think of it, one could make an entire program only for the photo thing. (Multiple photos, per-program attribution, friends have free access to all of them (or at least some) so they can tag me which whatever they choose, perhaps seasonal changes, automatic capture/change of the portrait when a video camera is available (in concert with the preferred snapshot application), temporary picture analogue to the status-text in IM programs, blah, blah...) And some network-of-trust thing would be very useful (and a nice excuse for more GPG), for things like "allow these persons to see where I am" using the laptop's GPS----

OK, I'll stop day-dreaming now. This bug report is just about knowing
that I can enter my info there and trust it won't be beamed to every
site I access, etc.

** Affects: control-center (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
gnome-about-me has no documentation
https://launchpad.net/bugs/80899