On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 22:40:23 +1000
wirelessduck--- via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

>
> > 3) if the user opted out create some kind of /dev/null folder (I suspect that such
> > thing doesn't exist yet) to delete the data in realtime
>
> Is the data saved into the telemetry folder before being transmitted anywhere? Can you just delete the folder and recreate it as a symlink to /dev/null?
Hi,
They say it is not transmitted by them unless you opt-in but it is stored and other applications with the same user permissions
could read it and send it if they want to. So periodically deleting the data could be a mitigation but is sub-optimal.
You cannot link a directory to /dev/null, only files.

To create a directory equivalent to /dev/null you need something like:

https://github.com/abbbi/nullfsvfs

nullfs

a virtual file system that behaves like /dev/null

It can handle regular file operations like mkdir/rmdir/ln but writing to files does not store any data.
The file size is however saved, so reading from the files behaves like reading from /dev/zero with a fixed size.

Writing and reading is basically an NOOP, so it can be used for performance testing with applications that
require directory structures. Implemented as kernel module, instead of using FUSE, there is absolutely no
overhead for copying application data from user to kernel space while performing write or read operations.

This one looks really good to me as the project seems to be active and has dkms support.
I think I will test it as it comes handy to solve this and similar cases of data hoarding
by sending the data directly into oblivion. Will add it to my private repo.

Ciao,
Tito