User privacy

[Robert Heller]

At Tue, 16 Feb 2021 19:48:50 +0000 "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 at 19:35, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> 
> > More to the point, does it *matter* if others can read what's there?
> >
> > Everyone in the world is welcome to the contents of my .bashrc file,
> > I'd love them to be able to learn any morsels of information they can
> > find there.
> >
> > Default should be *ALLOW* access, hide the bits you think should be
> > hidden.  In a work situation I'd have thought nothing should be
> > hidden, what part of your work should be hidden from your colleagues?
> >
> 
> Basically, it is a laptop belonging to a mother who also wanted her
> daughter to use it to access the Internet. She wants to have her personal
> files private from her daughter in that context.
> Because she isn't particularly technical, I hope to make the default
> situation that the mother's files, by default, are not accessible outside
> of her account.
> 
> I have told her that if the daughter takes up hacking and has physical
> access to the system that it would become pretty difficult to maintain that
> privacy. But, assuming the daughter isn't a hacker, just providing a
> certain level of privacy would work - I hope.

The *long term* solution might be to get the daughter a cheap laptop of her 
own.  But, setting the home directories to o-rwx will certainly do the job.  I 
suspect that files on /tmp are not likely to be a major issue.

> 
> HTH,
> 
> 
> Ian
> 

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