Hi tito,

tito via Dng writes:

> 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

I'd give

mkdir /home/user/telemetry
chmod 0000 /home/user/telemetry

a try first and a read-only filesystem mounted on /home/user/telemetry
next. All the while keeping a crontabbed eye on directory content, of
which there should not be any.

# You need root privileges to look for content after the chmod.

If preventing writes breaks your KDE Plasma desktop, something is badly
mis-engineered. If it still manages to write stuff to that directory,
something "evil" is going on, in that the telemetry stuff is using
elevated privileges, and it may be time to use nullfsvfs.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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